“It comes back to that question of what do you want to achieve?” commented Daniel Kingham, Vice President and Head of Service Innovation and Design, Elekta, in response to Dutta’s question to the group.

“What does the customer want to accomplish with the data as well?

“Where we have secondary or tertiary uses of data, we’ve found, through working with some of our sales organisation, that we’re able to do a layer of business development for some of our customers using the data we have. We never designed the data for that purpose, but it’s quite fascinating to sit down and discuss the use of our products over the last five to ten years,” Kingham added.

“The sales team were very apprehensive initially. Their view was that if we presented this to customers, and they’re going to start challenging why we’ve got this data, or where do we get it from? However, not one customer has challenged that and every single one has opened a very different discussion on what they should be doing next.”

Indeed, there are different types of data being used in a wide variety of situations that can improve service operations. However, we will need to consider how the data is stored and tagged if we are to find meaningful insights out of it.

One such example would be the increasing use of video and photo data as a mechanism for documenting maintenance work.

As Mark Homer, Managing Partner, Field Service Associates, commented.

“In terms of technology usage, we are seeing growing uptake in video, the use of video, the use of imagery, the use of photography.

“Anecdotally, we had a smart meter fitted recently, and I was amazed at how many photographs the engineer took pre, during and after to prove evidence that he’d done the work.

“I thought that’s fascinating and obviously somewhere that is a set of data being stored, that’s likely to be mined via some sort of machine learning tool to tag it in particular way. But again, it was a third party contractor providing evidence to prove that something had been done accurately successfully, and really trying to minimise the effort required to type out a report. It got me to thinking that maybe we’ll see new data types as clearly, there are new attributes coming.”

While much of the conversation around data and digital transformation revolves around processes and technology, as we saw in a previous article in this series, working towards a defined use case can be a pathway to establishing better results. When it comes to defining a customer use case, we simply have to work with and alongside our customers, so the people part of the equation must also be considered.

If you wish to read more from the group on how the challenges, benefits and barriers to effective use of asset data then download the full executive briefing now (available for a limited period on our forever free subscription tier FSN FREE)