Data Wrapping Can Help Companies Make Better Products

'Data Wrapping' around products
and services can help companies improve their offerings to customers according
to Barbara Wixom, a principal research scientist at the MIT Center for
Information Systems Research.
A tractor may be
"wrapped" with a dashboard to monitor operational performance, a bank
account may be "wrapped" with a budgeting tool, a cab trip may be
"wrapped" with a fare estimator.
These wraps can create indirect
value by, say, increasing customer retention and wallet share or boosting
customer satisfaction.In a recent report built around surveys of more than 500
companies, Wixom, along with researchers Killian Farrell – a student in MIT
Sloan’s Master of Business Analytics program – and Ronny Schüritz, outlines the
fundamentals of generating business value from data wrapping.
What data wrap does:
1)Anticipate by intuiting
customer needs. Anticipatory wraps offer predictive and proactive features.
2)Advise through the use of
evidence-based decision making. Wraps with advisory features provide data and
insights that inform a customer’s decisions.
3)Adapt by meeting customer
needs in a tailored way across different environments and contexts.
4) Act, which means that the
wrap performs an action to benefit the customer. Wraps that act are integrated
into customer processes or behaviors, or they trigger behavior automatically on
the customer’s behalf. For example, a bank app that automatically transfers
funds to help a customer avoid overdraft fees.
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