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Showing posts from September, 2017

Don’t ignore active data, the trees in the big data forest

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This post was also published on Enterprise CIO. Big data has been in vogue for years, but many businesses are having a lot of difficulty harnessing value and gaining insights from the voluminous amounts of data they collect. However, there is an often-ignored set of data in the enterprise that is truly actionable, data that I call “active” data. Active data is “in-flight data” that represents things that are changing or need some sort of action taken to move forward. Active data includes data like open purchase orders, new PTO or family leave requests, sales opportunities that are changing in scope, orders that are shipped late and so on. Surprisingly, there's a relatively small amount of active data, even in companies with tens or even hundreds of thousands of employees. Yes, there is a lot of data floating around the enterprise, but there are only so many open Purchase Order requests and or Key Performance Indicators—data that employees actually need and use. The