For businesses, one of the most tantalizing promises of the digital revolution is the ability to use data to create value—to generate ROI from the raw information streaming in from professional networks as much as from actual “things.”
Yet businesses have struggled to articulate how to go about extracting value from this new source. As Gartner’s Andrew White recently noted in a review of data and analytics in strategic plans, “The vast majority of such documents do not make any reference to a real measurable business outcome [and] … misconstrue the term strategy for plan, action, decision, risk, principle, goal, direction, effort, tactic, and so on.”