Value in Data

The information age is now at least one decade old but businesses have not yet adapted.
Well, those in the Silicon Valley may have but not those in Toulouse, Utrecht, Luxembourg, Florence or Frankfurt.

While most of the companies are sitting on treasures of data, few know there is additional value in it. And even fewer know how to do obtain that value.
Since I'm doing something like this (transforming data into value) for a few years now, I thought I might as well write about it in the hope to help the interested.

The tools to unearth this value are

• a business man's mind: knowing where there could be value, who would benefit and how, how big the impact is and how big the value of the new information is in relation to the cost of making it accessible. Ultimately, it's about the question: Is it worth it?
• a researcher's mind: the treasures are not hidden all in finance or car manufacturing. Instead, you must adapt to each new domain, find out where there are opportunities and find the correct way how to build on these opportunities. Curiosity and life-long learning are indispensable traits on this quest. And mathematics and statistics a steady companion.
• a developer's mind: rarely you will find the diamond that you can immediately use. Instead, you will have to transform the data, combine it with data from somewhere else, often in a live system, and produce your analysis or predictions continuously, using web services, cloud technology, databases and the like.

In the coming weeks, I will start to write a little bit more about each of these topics.