RETURN ON INVESTMENT

The figure below simplifies our understanding of the full value of content. Here we are talking about structured data, but the concept extends to all forms of data.

Great companies are built to make money, to increase shareholder wealth, to provide a humanitarian improvement, to make the environment cleaner. There are many reasons. Whatever the reason one thing is clear, the organism, the ecology, the environment within which companies thrive (or fail) is more complex, faster, more interconnected, more extended, more collaborative than ever before.

Smart people have come up with many ways to measure the ‘goodness’ of one company versus another, or the degree of efficiency of use of assets, the productivity of its management and employees, the amount of equity versus debt, and so on. There are many ratios used to examine whether a company is operating well or not.

Companies have investments that are supposed to help improve those ratios.

Companies maintain their assets, train their people, organize and connect their departments in efficient ways, to help do things better, faster and cheaper. Companies buy new computers and new enterprise applications like ERP, EAM, CRM and SRM, or employ new strategies or engage in new ways of thinking that result in more efficient business processes.

But, as is very often the case, companies forget about one important ingredient. Companies do not invest in their data! As a means of illustration, imagine one record in a database.

Imagine that database being local to a particular plant at a particular division of a particular company in a particular country. Imagine that particular plant buying that item (which just happens to be a commodity, like a bearing) from more than one supplier at more than one price. Just imagine more than one person making purchases and entering a new record for a similar item from yet another supplier.

• What if this type of data, item and purchasing ‘stewardship’ is replicated at many plants in many locations, each perhaps having its own business system and database?
• What if this record is accessed by engineering, by manufacturing, by purchasing, by inventory management?
• What if this record is accessed by outside constituents, like suppliers. Is it accessible?
• What if this record is a finished good your company sells?
• Does it contain all the necessary information to conduct business efficiently with all of your customers?

Content by itself hasn’t much value. When that content (or data) is used multiple times by lots of people across a broad network of interconnected webs, then that content becomes extremely valuable. But like a virus, if it is ‘toxic’, that data can do more harm than good. If the data is complete, current, correct and comprehensive, then it will continue to provide value for as long as it is relevant to your business, and your extended business.