Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

DATA BECOME LESS VALUABLE

This may seem counterintuitive, but we believe data will become less valuable in the future. Even now, data are everywhere, and people and organizations are overwhelmed with data. Basic economics dictate that when something is widely available, it becomes less valuable and when something is scarce, it becomes more valuable. In the future, having a treasure trove of data will not, by itself, hold much value. However, we do expect analytics to become more valuable at the same time that the supporting data become less valuable. In other words, the companies that have the ability to create actionable knowledge-based tools from data, either using their own data or using someone else’s data, will see the benefits of the expected analytical economy. This will take many forms, everything from applications that sift through data for nuggets of insight to personalized algorithms that allow individual users to analyze their own data to understand something about themselves and take action.

To illustrate why we think data will become less valuable, consider the early days of the commercial Internet, the late 1990s, as an example. At that time, as it is today, almost anyone could create Internet content and allow other people to view it. At first, this was a novelty, and consumers were happy to view new Internet information as it came online. Early users of the commercial Internet took a model with its roots in traditional library science, the Gopher protocol, as a ...