Data is the New Oil

One of the most valuable assets a company owns sits at the feet of the receptionist, behind server room doors (hopefully locked), or in an external data center (or its new, prestigious name, the ‘Cloud’).

These assets are, of course, the data that a company has carefully nurtured for years or, in many cases, shoved onto a server like the winter scarves thrown into the hall closet, never to be seen again. Regardless of how it was gathered or how carefully it is guarded, a company’s data can become a critical part of any business’s success.

As we add new clients and discuss ‘Data is the New Oil’ with them, we continue to be delighted with the changes that their vision and our ability to bring their data to the surface have on their processes, productivity, and profits. The realization that they can reshape their worlds around their data has produced many amazingly creative ideas.

A few of my favorites:

• The state-­wide church association that collects information on their 1,100 churches over the web now reconciles that data with past data, trends, and church policies. Budgets and future direction is now based on reliable information.
• Our favorite donut shop client (he bring donuts to our weekly meetings, the geeks are in heaven) now predicts the next day’s donut production, based on decades of sales histories – less waste, happier donut fans, and the ability to predict profitability.
• We have a national hobby association that can now plan events based on actual membership in an area – then be able to contact the important contributors with an easily extracted email list.

Each of these clients has discovered the oil just beneath the surface of their businesses. It’s always been there, or needed to be collected, but ignored because it was just too hard to extract and impossible to use.

We build applications that focus on data and a user experience that will maximize the value of that data. We can reach into your existing systems, create new databases, or expose your data to your other systems.