Barbara Wixom

Is your organization operating as an “information business,” treating data as a strategic asset? Does your organization liquify data assets, cultivate a data democracy that enthusiastically engages with data assets and connect data monetization with financial performance? As leaders aspire to leverage new technological advancements such as AI, it’s important to ensure that the organization can successfully move through the entire data-value creation process. According to Barbara Wixom, Ph.D., Principal Research Scientist at MIT’s Center for Information Systems Research (CISR) and one of the world’s leading data thought leaders, becoming great at AI requires a deep understanding of data monetization so AI investments contribute to the right value creating initiatives, with the right capabilities – and generate desired outcomes.

Wixom has spent three decades in academia helping organizations better understand and create value from their data while debunking myths and illuminating core concepts that matter. Her accessible workshops and easily applied frameworks and management tools simplify the often complicated conversations about data and AI to help leaders learn how to maximize their data and AI investment returns.

Through her expert guidance and vast experiences with organizations of all types, Wixom can help organizations in any sector think like an information business and formulate a distinct data monetization strategy and approach that works for them.

Don’t Fall Behind in Data Monetization

In her award-winning book, “Data is Everybody’s Business: The Fundamentals of Data Monetization” (MIT Press, September 2023), Wixom explains that data monetization must be a core business activity for all organizations, regardless of whether the organization is big or small, commercial or non-commercial. The book describes data monetization using language that anyone from board members and executive teams to front line worker can understand. Wixom’s simple terms, clear definitions and easy to use frameworks make data monetization consumable and free up people enterprise-wide to have productive conversations about how to monetize data.

Also included are Wixom’s “flywheel” frameworks – which she refers to as “the ABCs of data monetization” – that communicate what it takes to be successful with data monetization, data liquidity and data democracy.

“The flywheel consists of three frameworks that allow organizations to maximize value creation and realization with their data,” explains Wixom, winner of the 2021 Association for Information Systems AIS Outreach Practice Publication Award for her data monetization research. “These frameworks show how to monetize what you need to monetize, who’s involved, and what the overall organizational implications are.”

Succeeding in AI: Scaling up, Scaling out, and Sustaining at Scale

With the increasing focus on artificial intelligence, Wixom urges leaders to think of how to learn about, grow into, and establish foundations for AI that will allow them to incorporate it into business-as-usual activities. With a focus on demystifying what it takes to scale AI systems, she educates leaders on the nuance of scaling up – moving AI into deployment; scaling out – taking an AI model and using it in different contexts and geographies; and sustaining at scale – managing volumes of interrelated AI models over time.

“In the past, scaling up was about getting as many user adoptions as possible, but that thinking doesn’t work with AI,” explains Wixom, who has been tracking fifty AI projects over time to investigate how such projects grow and change. “With AI, at the end of the day you don’t want more users. In many effective AI deployments, you’re actually reducing adoption.” 

Since 1994, Barbara Wixom’s research on data management and analytics has included large-scale surveys, meta-analyses, lab experiments and in-depth case studies. She is a leading academic scholar, publishing in such journals as Information Systems Research, MIT Sloan Management Review, MIS Quarterly and MIS Quarterly Executive. Wixom regularly presents her work to academic and business audiences around the world.

Wixom joined the MIT Sloan School of Management in June 2013 to serve as a Principal Research Scientist at the Center for Information Systems Research (CISR). She leads the MIT CISR Data Research Advisory Board, comprised of one hundred data and analytics executives from CISR organizations. The board prioritizes, informs and participates in data research activities in ways that influence findings and insights at MIT CISR and help advance the field of data analytics.

Prior to MIT CISR, Wixom was a tenured faculty member at the University of Virginia (UVA) where she twice earned the UVA All-University Teaching Award (2002, 2010), which recognizes teaching excellence in professors. In 2017, she was awarded the Teradata University Network Hugh J. Watson Award for contributions to the data and analytics academic community. She won the 2021 Association for Information Systems AIS Outreach Practice Publication Award for her data monetization research. In 2024, her book, “Data is Everybody’s Business” won the Axiom Awards silver medal in the Business Intelligence / Innovation category. Wixom actively works to encourage women, young people and underrepresented populations to learn about data and pursue data-related careers.

Barbara Wixom is available to advise your organization via virtual and in-person consulting meetings, interactive workshops and customized keynotes through the exclusive representation of Stern Speakers & Advisors, a division of Stern Strategy Group^®.