I recently read a story of an antique dealer who thought that an old baseball card might be worth at least $10.00 on eBay. It was wrinkled and faded so she could not tell exactly what photo was on the card. After posting it on eBay and getting strange requests she decided to be certain and had a professional evaluator examine the card. The card was the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first professional baseball team in the US. This old, wrinkled and discolored card sold for over $75,000.
Reading this story, I immediately thought of our information. Information stored in legacy systems, buried in old emails, and tucked away in untouched files. Do we know the true value of our information? I’d wager perhaps not. Every year we collect terra bytes of data. According to the IDC information creation grows faster than 65% a year.
Unfortunately like a hoarder we collect it because of a compulsion rather than from the understanding of its value. Names, addresses, notes, tweet streams, instant messages, YouTube videos, surveys, audit trails, medical history, sales history, customer data, vendor data: masses and masses of information that we then leave unattended and eventually forgotten. Why? Because like the antique dealer we fail to realize the real value of the information we collect. And unfortunately we sometimes apply our spring cleaning rules to data: if it has not been touched in six months trash it.
I understand it’s daunting. After all we are talking about massive amounts of unstructured and structured data that we need to sift through, identify the nuggets, and extract business value. And the data pool is showing no signs of lessening anytime soon. Thankfully we have unique solutions like Velocity that help us not just search and sort information but optimize our information delivering instant access and valuable insight. Training materials once forgotten can now be repurposed for new employee training. Vendor purchases can now be easily analyzed so we can quickly identify trends and purchase quality materials at the lowest price. A research and development (R&D) project placed on hold can now provide needed background information for a new research project. Market research shows that information optimization resulted in a 22% reduction in R&D spend from re-purposing available research. (Independent study of Velocity Information Optimization clients)
So the onus is on us to first understand that the information we collect is a tangible asset. Then let’s contract an expert such as Velocity to explore and uncover the antiques we have hidden in our data repositories. We talk about the cost of lost data, but let’s really consider the opportunity-cost of information lost behind the virtual dust, wrinkles and discoloration of organizational ignorance. Go get your antique.
data repositories, information, Information Optimization, R&D, value of information, Velocity
