ABSTRACT
Retailers combine data on their customers and the weather to predict sales, banks use predictive analytics to determine if they should approve consumer loans and which of their customers are most likely to repay them, and who can forget Barack Obama's 2012 rise to the White House being touted as 'The first big data election'. Data is really just another word for information, and undervaluing the need for information in a business would be reminiscent of the film companies who underestimated the threat from digital photography, and the video rental companies who initially ignored growing interest in online streaming services. Data standardisation is an incredibly important part of data strategy. While Special Olympics International has been collecting this anonymised athlete participation data for a long time, the use of that data at an individual level as opposed to an aggregated one has been overlooked.
