Is data the new ..... sand castle?
I remember vividly many moons ago, going on our annual beach holiday, how my toddlers would entertain themselves for hours, building sand castles. Like any good parent, we would respond with “good job”, “awesome” or “oh wow” to whatever the result was.
Over the past decade or so, I've been party to numerous strategic discussions on the theme data is the new oil.
I’ve listened to statements like:
- We’re sitting on a gold mine with the data we have
- We need to find ways to monetize our data
- You need to pay me x for the consumer data I have
- This product/service will gather extremely valuable data
- We’re implementing this service, because we want the data
It seems obvious that if we as corporates don’t know what we want or can do with data to create value for our customers, gathering it in itself is worthless. Just like a sand castle. Worse even, it could be a fruitless cost, that keeps a lot of employees, servers and boardrooms very busy. Just like the toddlers on a beach scenario.
Creating value from data is the thing. What are the chances that many of us are actually creating worthless, costly sand castles of data - hoping to find a robo-magician to convert it into cement, or paint, or glass......or an oil field, somewhere in the near future?