Mind the data gap

With the cost of computing and managing data going down every year, your organisation is able to capture and store increasing amounts of data. At the start of computing we were optimising applications and data storage to gain bytes. Nowadays, we have the ability to store TBs. Given the shift in cost per TB the type of data that is kept moves from the formally recognised business events, such as invoices and orders, to informal events such as GPS locations, website click behaviour, etc. The vast amount of informal events have the potential of generating insight and delivering business value if the proper algorithms are applied to them. With the positions of cell phones we can improve the flow of traffic or with the use of a website we can improve the efficiency of our product MDM efforts by focussing on the fields that seem to have the biggest impact on the buying ratio. Not every company has tapped into this rich source of informal events. Failing to exploit this ever increasing source of insight is the true information value gap.