#122 - Herman Heyns, CEO of Anmut - On the exponential value we leave on the table by not treating our data as an asset

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable businesses around the globe to leverage the world-changing potential of their data. My guest is Herman Heyns, CEO of Anmut.

Herman is an experienced professional with nearly 30 years of experience in Finance, Technology, Data & Analytics and Value Management. He was a former lead partner at Accenture, KPMG and EY.

In 2018, he founded Anmut together with Professor Andy Neely, Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Cambridge University. The company was started to solve a big problem. They saw the world-changing potential of data being lost because most organisations don’t understand the real value of it. They set up Anmut to value data. They do so by translating the intangible idea of data into an asset business can better manage and with that earn higher returns on their data investments and ultimately drive more change. Doing so, Anmut democratises the value of data, for all those businesses that aren’t Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Netflix or Microsoft.

This inspired me, and hence I invited Herman to my podcast. We explore the opportunity many organizations leave unexplored by not treating their data like they treat their physical or financial assets. We dig into why that is the case and what we can do about it to create a sizable advantage. We also discuss Herman’s POV and experience in what it takes to create a software business worth making a remark about.

Here are some of his quotes:

How we do business can be a lot more gracious. How we solve business problems can be a lot more elegant and actually better for all stakeholders, not just for the investor. Thinking differently about how we solve business problems has, can create an enormous amount of value.

It became apparent to me that the vast majority of organizations talk about data being very important, but they don't actually look at it as an asset. In other words, they don't apply the same disciplines, they were to their physical or financial assets.

Because they're not actually putting the performance measures in place to look at the data as an asset and reward people for looking at it responsibly, they miss an enormous amount of their value potential.

For some companies, the value of their data is more than 50% of the total value of the company. So, by not looking at that asset, you’re leaving an enormous amount of value on the table.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. That we leave lot of value locked up because we don’t use the power of technology enough to enable our customers to connect the dots
2. How we can help our customers create transformative change by helping them to make small changes to the human behaviour of their employees
3. Why our potential as a software business is often undermined because we don’t fully understand ourselves what value we deliver to our customers