Fuel Of Future: Why Data Is Fuel In The Modern Economy

21st Century data is like 18th Century oil: an indispensable, emerging resource. Like oil, there will be immense benefits for those who see the profound value of Data and learn to extract and leverage it.

We are in a digital economy where the centrality of the Data is substantially higher than ever. It is the secret to smooth integration of everything from government to local enterprises. Progress would cripple, without it.

What is Data?

Everything! Indeed everything. About what time you wake up, what you eat for breakfast, what you wear, which car you are using to get to your office, what you are doing for fun. Everything!

At first, it may seem insignificant to you, but for the companies out there, it is quite fundamental. Something that they can calculate will be used, if not just some other time now, but it would be useful.
Unbelievable though real, most of the world's big stock exchanges have trading data as old as 140 years!

The digital age has generated an enormous amount of information, with total data expected to increase to 44 zettabytes by the year 2020

Why Data is the new Fuel?

So what was the prime purpose of oil? It is driving! Isn't it?  It provides the energy required to operate them, from cars to machines. Now data has brought it to a new level. It drives people, their desires, their decisions, their likes and dislikes and hence whole businesses running around people.

Thus, Data, the raw material fed to analytics engines, is essential to the excellence and accomplishment of an organization in delivering better customer experiences, speeding up product and service innovation, streamlining compliance and much more!

How Data drive the world?

What do marketing survey companies now doing? They talked to the people and wanted to examine their opinions. Their results came up, and they helped the business. This practice has only been supported by technology. It can be analyzed with scale and speed.

Then take Google, for example. You are listening to a dozen of your favorite tracks. When sleeping in your room, Google's algorithms assess that you are going through a tough time, and it recommends some of the other songs that you might like.  You can also see some of your other favorites on your suggestion page.

Your Google search for a restaurant, trace that location on Google Maps. It shows you will need 10 minutes to reach. How does it work? On that road, other mobile phones send data to Google. Google Maps analyze their location transition pace and based on that it comes up with the number.

How is it helping?

You find a restaurant every Sunday. Google analyses that every Sunday, you wish to have a restaurant. It sells the data to marketing firms. They know every Sunday that you need to have a variety. Plus, every Sunday, you need a spot to eat around. You will soon begin to receive ads for delivery to your house. Restaurants will be available in all kinds. The more you use Google, the more it refines its search. Whether it is the setting, taste or cuisine, just like this, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and others are also collecting data. So you see, Data is all over the world. They try to monetise all that you do.

Data Infrastructure Should Become a Profit Center

The data infrastructure is still a profit center for many businesses today. It can become a profit centre by using the data to enhance it day by day. Companies must begin to manage data as a corporate asset across the enterprise while still handling the Data locally within business units.

This allows data exchange about products and customers – providing opportunities for up-selling, cross-selling, improving customer experience and retention rates. By making use of internal data in conjunction with external data, every company in the world will have a tremendous opportunity to develop new products and services across business lines.

The Fuel that Runs Business

The digital age has generated an enormous amount of information, with total data expected to increase to 44 zettabytes by the year 2020. This vast volume of data has proved incredibly useful to large companies for the first time. And businesses can incorporate disparate data into meaningful AI algorithms for manipulating and understanding behaviours. Data adoption in organizations had reached 53% by the end of 2017.

A crucial competitive advantage for leading companies in the use and comprehension of data. To the degree that businesses can obtain more data from existing infrastructure, and consumers can give them the ability to uncover secret insights not reached by their competitors.

Data can offer an array of new growth opportunities, from internal insights to customer-facing experiences at the front. These involve three main market opportunities: automation, in-depth analysis and data-driven decision-making.

The Future

Now everything is Data and Data is everything.

So, transforming data into business value is more complicated than many businesses thought it would be. It requires deeper capital, more experience and more challenging work than envisioned. But unless you are trying to buy a one-way ticket to a remote island, investing time is vital to future survival.

Even though it will take data literacy skills to achieve the transformation level that saturates a business from top to bottom, AI and machine learning to make sense of our growing data set, and just like we need upgraded skills for today's mechanics handling today's highly digital cars, companies need to start building data capabilities to ignite their data fuel, accelerate the transformation and ensure enduring progress.