ABSTRACT
In aggregate, business organizations spend billions of dollars annually to store and maintain the ever-expending volumes of data, driven by the belief that data is an organizational asset. However, many data-rich companies put more into data, in terms of ongoing expenditures, than they get out of it, in terms of decision-aiding knowledge. In that sense, what is believed to be an asset can in fact be a drag on organizational earnings… Does it sound extreme? Well, data does not appreciate (in fact, as it ages it tends to lose relevance) or pay dividends—which means that data can only be considered an asset to the degree to which it yields decision-aiding insights.
