Discover

Knowledge is of two kinds: we know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.

—Samuel Johnson, long before Google

We’ve never seen an organization that is short on data. Nor have we seen one without volumes of reports, analytical tools, data models, and dashboards. It isn’t that the right data doesn’t exist; it is that individual people may not know where to find it or how to access it.

This is the data discovery gap. The gap between supply and demand for data often is the result of, ironically, incomplete information. Just like imperfect information leads to price distortions in the economic marketplace, imperfect information within an organization leads to organizational data inefficiencies. The person who could most benefit from an understanding of customer lifetime value may not know that a well-researched analysis already exists. Better data discovery also has the added benefit of revealing duplicate, competing, or...