DATA & ANALYTICS
“ I ’ ve not done a digitalisation presentation in the last 10 years where we have not used the phrase ‘ data is the oil of the 21st century ’,” Woods describes . “ It is ultimately the fuel that ’ s fueling the fourth industrial revolution that we live in today . Peter Sondergaard coined that from Gartner quite some time ago . And data is absolutely the fuel to AI and data is the fuel to digitalisation in everyday view .
“ We have equated data to oil , and looking at the current oil price , the price of data is pretty valuable and therefore maybe that ’ s why so many of us store data indefinitely .”
However , the challenge is that data in an organisation can easily become cluttered . “ As humans , we are data hoarders . We hang on to all of our data . We hang on to perhaps my tax return that I did in the early 2000s , because we think it ’ ll have some value in the future . We see organisations hanging on to the menu that they had in the canteen in 2001 probably has no real value to that because they just think that the more we store , the more we can mine , the more value you can have .”
IAN WOOD
TITLE : FORMER UK HEAD OF TECHNOLOGY
COMPANY : VERITAS LOCATION : UNITED KINGDOM
An experienced , dedicated and passionate technical sales leader , Ian Wood ’ s 20 + year IT career has spanned several diverse roles at international software companies from field based technical sales , technical sales management and overlay sales management through to global head of solutions and product marketing .
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