DTA IS THE NEW OIL, SO WHY AREN'T WE RICH by W H Inmon

DATA IS THE NEW OIL, SO WHY AREN’T WE ALL RICH?

By W H Inmon

Data is the new oil. We have a lot of data. So why aren’t we all rich?

I grew up in West Texas. It is hot, dry, and – in most people’s eyes – barren and ugly. My grandfather came to West Texas in the late 1890’s and homesteaded the land. A family joke is that he could have chosen any land he wanted, so he must have been on the run from the law in order to have chosen what he did. I have memories of mesquite bushes, cactus, rocks, rattlesnakes, and being eternally thirsty.

The early pioneers in West Texas were a special breed of people. Each had their own reason for being there. There is much more beautiful land in many places – Colorado, California, Oregon, Washington, Utah, New Mexico to name a few. Why someone would choose hot, dry, barren land as a place to settle is beyond me.

What none of those early settlers knew was that underneath that ugly earth was oil. Lots of oil. Something called the Permian basin.

Now did the people – in 1890 – feel rich? It turns out that many of them had oceans of oil underneath their feet. But waking up every morning and facing the sun and the scrub and sandstorms and dry plains, I doubt that any of them felt rich. They just wanted to scratch out a living for just another day. Rich was the last thing on their minds.

You see there is a big difference between having oil and being rich. Even if you have oil, there is a lot of work to do in order to turn that oil into money. There is exploration. There are dry holes. There is drilling. There is pumping. There is building a pipeline. There is refining and storing the oil. There are legal hassles. There is getting the oil to the distributor. There is pumping the gasoline. So there is money associated with the land but the money sits at the long end of a pipeline. Eventually there is money associated with oil. But merely having oil in the ground does not mean you have money. There is a tremendous amount of work to be done to turn that oil into money.

Today corporations sit there with petabytes of data. But few of those corporations have a clue as to how to turn that data into monetary advantage. Merely having data does not mean you are rich.

Let me illustrate with a little story. A while back I was at a conference of CIO’s. I was a speaker. I was speaking on using architecture to achieve business value. Scheduled opposite of me was another presentation on some new device to come out of Silicon valley. I forget what device it was. I doubt if the device even exists today.

So the CIO’s at this conference could choose a presentation on architecture and business value or a presentation on the latest gizmo coming from Silicon valley. I ended up having two people attend my presentation. The other room was jammed with CIO’s. Only a handful of CIO’s wanted to hear about the hard work of architecture. They wanted to see the glamorous new buzz.

And that explains (at least to me) why corporations have a lot of data today, but they still aren’t rich. Just because they have data does not mean they are rich. Just like oil in West Texas. Just because you have oil in the ground does not mean that you can necessarily turn that oil into money. It takes hard work and innovation and taking chances and making mistakes in order to get to the monetary reward.

There are MANY challenges waiting the company that wants to turn their data into wealth. Some of the many challenges are –

   Integrating the data

   Turning textual data into a usable form

   Separating out useful data from less than useful data

   Identifying believable data and separating it from unbelievable data

   Organizing the data into a useful form

And this list barely scratches the surface. This is not even the tip of the iceberg. It is the tip of the tip of the tip of the iceberg.

If we are going to turn data into money (and it really can be done) we are going to have to have leadership that is not afraid of rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty. There are a few such leaders (God bless them). But for the most part the leadership of IT is just pathetic.
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Bill Inmon’s latest books include HEARING THE VOICE OF THE CUSTOMER, Technics Publications, TURNING TEXT INTO GOLD, Technics Publications, and DATA ARCHITECTURE: SECOND EDITION, Elsevier Press. Bill’s company – Forest Rim Technology – reads raw text and turns text into a data base. Bill is based in Denver, Colorado.