Frictionless integration: The key to generating shared expertise

This article is the second of a two-part series discussing the value of shared expertise. You can find part one here.

“Data is just like crude. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analyzed for it to have value.”

“Data is the new oil” is a phrase that has been thrown around the last few years as an axiom of the modern world. It headlines articles in high-profile magazines like The Economist and Forbes. It is a simple, powerful idea that has led companies to invest millions of dollars into big data technologies. Still, it didn’t take long for people like Tim Harford from the Financial Times to realize that “Big data has arrived, but big insights have not.”

Tell me if any of these scenarios are familiar to you:

• We are collecting a lot of data on our customers, but we still can’t answer the questions we're interested in.

• We hired a group of business analysts/data scientists to generate insights. They have built some very interesting dashboards but we’re always missing data and tools to make better decisions.

• We have heard about some exciting AI use cases and we are definitely getting into AI but we don’t know where to start.

• We have the best software and large databases, but we feel lost. We need a better data strategy but we simply don’t have the time right now.

• [Try filling in your own data related headache here. There are many.]

None of the above scenarios are invented. I have heard analysts to company owners share headaches like this over and over again. These are real problems in and of themselves, but what makes it even more difficult is that there are so many misconceptions out there with respect to data.