Commercial value research unit combines business with academia

Jointly launched as an Australian first by the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) and information management services firm Data Agility, the unit will focus on interpreting, manipulating and analysing an organisation’s data to determine its value in answering business questions.

While there is a commercial fee attached to the service, Data Agility Managing Director John Neville expects the new service to provide potential cost savings to client organisations by testing the commercial value of sales, revenue or customer demographic data before rolling out large-scale data projects such as a data warehouse.

“Organisations are accumulating vast amounts of data and seeking answers to questions buried in their data to boost business performance,” Neville said. “The idea behind the research unit is to allow organisations to determine if there is value in their data, and if further data analysis can actually answer any business questions,” said Neville.

“For example, a financial institution with flat revenue growth for a product line could uncover new data insights on customer segmentation and apply this knowledge to further increase revenues,” he said.

The partnership combines the academic expertise of the University and the commercial experience of Data Agility in the provision of enterprise information management services.

“We were looking for a better way to go about it [data management], and UTS were looking for a way to commercialise their techniques,” Neville said of the collaboration.

While he could not name current clients of the research unit, Neville said that a number of organisations have already identified research projects that will commence in the near future.

The research unit will be based at the UTS campus in Sydney city. Projects will be overseen by the Dean of IT, Tom Hintz and Professor Eng Chew, and staffed by a cross-disciplinary team of UTS researchers and Data Agility’s principal consultants.

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