“The unused, neglected, and really costly information you store in
a data warehouse, master customer information file, data lake, or any other place
isn’t lost forever — it just seems that way.”
In discussing The Theory of Everything and the Information Paradox, Stephen Hawking said, “I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon. The information about ingoing particles [in the event horizon] is returned, but in a chaotic and useless form. This resolves the information paradox. For all practical purposes, the information is lost.”
Though a topic usually reserved for erudite academics the likes of those found on television’s Big Bang Theory, the Black Hole Paradox impacts business in a big way — we are just too busy to notice. Or too deep in denial.
Take for instance what David Pier of IBM recently revealed to a stunned audience at the Chicago stop of the Salesforce.com 2017 World Tour: “80% of an organization’s data is dark and untouched.” Wow, that data costs you a king’s ransom to generate, capture, and maintain, both in human and monetary resources. And you are only using 20% of what you are paying for if you’re lucky?
“80% of your valuable data is dark and untouched
This is hardly surprising given a Kapta study of 300 CEOs that found 70% cite lack of meaningful data as their primary pain point. But in reality, lack of data is not the issue. Most organizations have data coming out of their eyeballs. The Information Paradox for business is that even though the massive amounts of data generated, collected, stored, and collated can be accessed, it is returned for the most part in “a chaotic and useless form.” Just like Hawking’s black hole information.
IDC validates the business Information Paradox in its recent updating of a groundbreaking 2001 report The High Cost of Not Finding Information. In the report authors Susan Feldman and Chris Sherman quantify in great detail the vast waste of time and money exacted by knowledge workers searching for and reworking information. Not to mention the associated opportunity costs.
According to IDC, knowledge workers actually find the information they need to perform their jobs 56% of the time, amounting to a whopping $110,000 per week in lost productivity [assumes an average workforce size of 1,000, your mileage may vary].
The Knowledge Deficit is a metric capturing the costs and inefficiencies that result from intellectual rework, substandard performance, and inability to find knowledge resources (both information and experts). The study concluded the Knowledge Deficit costs your organization an additional $5,850 per knowledge worker per year because team members spend 36% of their time looking for and consolidating information spread across a variety of systems, including network file shares, content management systems, intranets, legacy systems, and data repositories.
Similar research published by Kit Sims Taylor found that knowledge workers spend more time unwittingly recreating existing knowledge than in creating new knowledge. The cost to you is a mere $310,000 per week in lost opportunities (IDC), or more than $16MM per year on average. Moreover, it directly relates to additional unpredictable and unnecessary expenses, like the cost of bad decisions, employee frustration and low morale, job satisfaction, overall cost of sales and marketing (COSM), fill rates, service failures, and prolonged sales cycles.
A primary cause of the Information Paradox is business using antiquated and outmoded relational database technologies in keeping up with the velocity, variety, and volume of data involved. As the volume of data you manage increases, performance of a relational dB declines. Hence it diminishes the veracity and ultimate value of the data and information to be gleaned from it. “NoSQL” technologies offer improved, more consistent performance, yet they too fail to add value above and beyond standard reporting metrics and general trends and observations.
Generating true insights into today’s business climate requires n-dimensional thinking, where structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data from multiple sources —both inside and outside the organization — is aggregated, evaluated, shared, aligned with business outcomes, and acted on with intention, focus, and a unified vision.
Technology Information Engineering, also known as TIE, and Guided Information Access (GIA) are two patented emerging technologies providing n-dimensional data analysis, no matter the volume, velocity, or variety of the datasets involved. Developed by SpeedTrack™, of Yorba Linda, California, TIE and GIA are rapidly changing how business treats data, uncomplicating the process of transforming data into meaningful insights, and creating competitive advantages for forward thinking executives.
Data becomes information when it answers a question or facilitates a decision. MindMeld provides proven methodologies for operationalizing data aggregation and analysis, including value chain optimization for collaboratively sharing insights and ideas that generate continuous business process improvement and elevate business outcomes.
And now MindMeld Analytics™ powered by SpeedTrack enable you to integrate, analyze, and transform data into workable action plans with speed, accuracy, and unrivaled confidence — enabling you to virtually “animate your organizational intelligence” within a proprietary hosted analytics platform.
We call it Animated Organizational Intelligence because you intuitively dialogue with the data, extracting real and immediate answers that empower team members to make better decisions based on an n-dimensional view of the marketplace. With MindMeld Analytics you truly can see how much you know.
Business activities, organizational focus, and goal attainment are maximized when ideas, information, risks, and rewards are freely shared. In the prophetic words of W. Edwards Deming: “In God we trust, all others bring data.” Just make sure the data you bring is not of the chaotic and useless variety.
About MindMeld: Our vision is that your business will grow, prosper, and make a positive and lasting impact on the world. We accomplish this by helping you discover and communicate the inherent value of your products and services and capitalize on that value in lasting, meaningful ways. To learn more please contact doug.knuth@mindmeldmarketing.com.