FEATURE: STAFF RESOURCES
“Employees list
difficulties in assessing
whether data is truly
useful and they cite low
quality, accuracy, or
completeness of data as
a barrier to data-driven
decision making.”
H
ow can businesses use data to ensure it becomes a
vital resource for enterprise employees?
For most companies, their data is their single biggest asset,
even though they may not know this - yet. Computing
hardware used to be a capital asset, while data wasn’t
thought of as an asset in the same way. Now, hardware is
becoming a service people buy in real time, and the lasting
asset is the data.
Data is now a form of capital, on the same level as financial
capital in terms of generating new digital products and
services. This development has implications for every
company’s competitive strategy, as well as for the computing
architecture that supports it. Contrary to conventional
wisdom, data is not an abundant resource. Instead, it is
composed of a huge variety of scarce, often unique, pieces of
captured information. Just as retailers can’t enter new markets
without the necessary financing, they can’t create new pricing
algorithms without the data to feed them.
In nearly all industries, companies are in a race to create
unique stocks of data capital - and ways of using it - before
their rivals outmanoeuvre them. Firms that have yet to see
data as a raw material are at risk. The vast diversity of data
captured and the decisions and actions that use that data
require a new computing architecture that includes three
key characteristics: data equality, liquidity, and security.
The pursuit of these characteristics drives the reinvention of
enterprise computing into a set of services that are easier
to buy and use. Some will be delivered over the Internet as
public cloud services. Some corporate data centres will be
reconfigured as private clouds. Both must work together.
New capabilities based on this new architecture, such as data-
driven tailoring of products and services, will yield not only
radical improvements in operational effectiveness, but also
new sources of competitive advantage.
In the future will data become one of the most important
resources for staff working for an enterprise? If so, why?
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