Data investments clearly have potential for high returns. But merely generating data is not sufficient. In fact, it’s worse than doing nothing. Gartner has estimated that up to 97% of organizational data sits unused, which not only yields no value for data owners but actually generates significant costs—monetarily for the businesses paying for storage, and environmentally for the rest of us. (Data centers are expected to consume 3–4% of global power by the end of the decade.)

This is why data activation is so critical. By thoughtfully transforming, analyzing, and deploying data, businesses can unlock the potential of this untapped resource and enhance nearly every decision, process, and experience across their organization. They can use data to stay competitive, anticipate customer needs, and reduce operational inefficiencies, successfully transitioning from stagnant data hoarders and manual operators to modern and efficient data-driven trailblazers.

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How Data Activation Fits Within ASMBL’s Broader Mission

The time wasted hunting down stray information, the mental load of second-guessing reports, the financial impact of making decisions without predictive insights . . . These losses compound to degrade both company performance and morale, building a barrier between people and their potential. Effective data activation breaks down this barrier.

Data activation also supports the remaining foundational pillars of ASMBL’s digital transformation services: experience design and business optimization. Through experience design, we help organizations create user-friendly interfaces that reduce friction and enhance engagement. Data boosts these experiences through experimentally driven optimization, personalized communications and interfaces, and natural language–based AI assistants.

Our business optimization services focus on streamlining or automating business processes and upgrading tooling to increase efficiency. Data activation provides right-place-right-time insights to inform decision-making and uses machine learning to predict blockages or downtime and prevent productivity issues before they occur. The recent evolution of AI agents, which are fueled by healthy data, presents additional opportunities to improve both processes and experiences by removing the human element entirely and allowing operators to turn their attention elsewhere.

So either on its own or in concert with ASMBL’s other digital transformation services, data activation plays a central role in achieving ASMBL’s mission.

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Our Approach to Data Activation

ASMBL’s approach to data activation is strategically designed to leverage our strengths as a longstanding engineering firm. We view data assets as products and manage them as such. We right-size solutions to support clients wherever they are on their data maturity journey. Finally, we define data project success through two key tenets: trust and utility.

Product Oriented Strategy

ASMBL has been building user-centric products for over a decade, and we use our time-tested product management expertise to treat data as a multifaceted product—both the data sets themselves and the applications they support, such as dashboards, predictive models, AI interfaces, and automated workflows. Each of these has a user base with specific needs, and each requires regular feedback and monitoring through its entire lifecycle, from initial design to implementation to ongoing improvement, to ensure continued relevance and value.

As we would for any product, we appoint product managers for data assets, and by managing the data and applications in tandem, ASMBL provides clients with a well-integrated suite of tools that empowers them to run their businesses with ease and confidence.

Attention to Data Maturity

ASMBL’s clients run the gamut from startups to Fortune 500 companies. We understand that every organization is at a unique stage in its data journey and that solutions must be designed to match. A team just getting started may still be running Excel-based analyses on data manually extracted from disparate sources, while an advanced team may already be training its own machine learning models and streaming real-time analytics to stakeholders.

Two Tenets of Data

Our data activation approach is grounded in two values that we hold in the highest regard: trust and utility.

Trust goes beyond just data quality however; it is critical that our clients also know their data is safe. ASMBL’s engineers employ industry-leading security practices, and we take the same precautions with our data products as we do with our custom enterprise applications. Our focus on data integrity and responsible data management enables clients to maximize the benefits of data activation and to continue investing in their data assets without hesitation.

By partnering with clients to understand their specific environment and business needs, ASMBL ensures that data assets are functional, actionable, and aligned with business goals, making data a powerful enabler of growth, efficiency, and innovation.

Starting on Your Data Activation Journey

If you’re curious what data activation can do for your own business, we’d love to chat.

The first step in this journey is evaluating your current level of data maturity. To get started, request our free digital maturity questionnaire, which will help determine how effectively your team uses its data assets and where opportunities for data-driven transformation exist. The results will provide a starting point for moving forward in your digital transformation journey.