Unrealized value in the expensive data lurking in your Enterprise
(The corporate equivalent of the dark web)
In our previous post, “Reconsidering Sustainability”, we related sustainability to strategy planning for legacy applications. This post focuses on the data curated by enterprise applications. Curated data and its value lurk in the dark corners of the enterprise. To some, they seem like an ugly duckling, clumsy, in the wrong form, with few attractive properties. Despite this appearance, this carefully curated data, created and refined at great cost may have positive value for operations, sales, marketing, and production.
But first, a little history - Data generated from the oldest legacy application may exist in mostly physical form — green bar/laser print paper, custom paper forms filed for compliance and regulatory reporting, bar code tags and labels to be pasted onto assets.
The brightly lit spaces for departmental servers or computer rooms produced this older legacy data gave way to the “lights out” and cloud data centers for lots of good reasons – better networks, tighter security, and cost consolidation/reductions. In many cases curated data was “left in the dark” as archive, historical, or unwanted. The curated continues to live on as authenticated and authoritative data for regulatory, legal, and technical reasons. An example is manufacturing traceability data needed for possible product recalls or liability cases.
The applications that inhabit the compute power and storage still hold the lurking data curated at huge costs. ERP, financial, and operational applications saw investments in the 100’s of millions of dollars over years (decades actually). The curated data – highly accurate from the intricate collection, processing, and reviews – is the result of investment, operations, and pack-rat retention.
Next up – Why is data lurking?
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