What is the value of location data?

My colleagues here at Esri wrote what I consider to be an excellent essay on the business value of location data and why it matters. In their essay, (https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/publications/wherenext/what-is-the-business-value-of-location-data/), they make it plain that while this value is more difficult to quantify than, say, a HVAC unit or the revenue of a store, the effort of pinpointing the value is definitely worth doing.

For example, Highways England pegged the value of its physical road infrastructure at £115 billion, a staggering amount, but yet the intangible value it delivered to the country was calculated to be even more, at £200 billion!  The latter figure was not a simple estimate, but arrived at only after nearly a year of extensive data gathering, including interviews with those touched in some way by the work of the highway agencies.

Why does all this matter? The article points out that only 16% of business assets are tangible assets nowadays. The implications of this percentage are clear: Businesses need to be able to understand the value that location data brings, and articulate this value to their stakeholders, customers, and CEOs. In addition to building this shared understanding, purpose, and lexicon, doing so yields additional benefits. For example, through examining the value that data brings to an organization and to the greater society, the business featured in the article put together a case for new investment, as well.

For a related article, see our Spatial Reserves essay on Putting a Value on Geospatial Data and this recent Forbes article. on “how much is your data worth?”

—Joseph Kerski