Posts Tagged ‘data repositories’

Committed to Wasting Time

Tuesday, December 27th, 2011

Innovation often feels risky. Typically, it entails committing significant resources to something that may not bring about the needed outcome. This uncertainty often causes decision-makers to shy away from innovation.

But as the rules governing business performance continue to mutate, it may be reasonable to look at innovation from the opposite direction: Why are we committing significant resources to something—in this case, the status quo—that will certainly not deliver the needed outcome?

And there is no doubt that our present IT solutions cannot deliver needed outcomes. As Andy McAfee, Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Center for Digital Business, recently explained, “We have collaboration tools that are not social, and social tools that are not collaborative.”

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An Antique: Dust off Your Data

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

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.

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