Data Is Not The New Oil, It’s The New Soil

If we enter any conference room or a lecture, it is not uncommon these days to hear “data is the most valuable resource” and “data is the new oil”. I was also party to this analogy. Off late, after working with a lot of organizations with data and solutions to predict the future, our realization is very different from this so-called simple analogy.

Let us look at the fundamental flaw in this analogy and how it can impact the actions we take. Oil is literally a liquid, which has value in its raw form, can be transformed into various value-adding products like petrol, diesel, kerosene, engine oil, sulphur etc. at various stages of extraction. This can further be converted to a room heat anywhere in the world or moving a commuter bus in India. Oil is valuable, marketable, and tradable.

Moving up the continuum needs a lot of groundwork and not so glamorous ones.No soil/land will be productive, unless we explore them, check the relevance and work on them. We need to plough the soil, add necessary ingredients to make it nutrient enough for the effective crops to come out of it.

This is the most important step if you really want to maximise the economic outcome. Even the best of organisations globally need a lot of work to be done in this area.

Create a data clinic to ensure all new product creations and transactions are clearly accounted and preserved from now on. Create a taxonomy that is relevant and important for your business. Involve predictive minds in this exercise as what you need for models to understand is different from what you need for the current way of working.

If you would like to move from descriptive to predictive analytics, time-series information of past data is critical. Cleaning of the past data is an absolute must. The returns would be exponential.

With data being 80% contributor to the outcome of any predictive modelling, always choose partners who can contribute to data than those who just come with models.

In fashion, data takes one more dimension unlike CPG companies i.e IMAGES. As we have always maintained fashion can’t be narrated and hence textual attributes alone are not good enough to plough the data. Every pixel in an image is valuable.