Why data is not "the new oil" and why it is actually like water.
Fair warning to you straight away. This could become a bit of a rant. Also, I'll try to avoid singling out any particular vendors and their marketing campaigns and likewise any economies that are currently extracting fossil fuels. This isn't personal, it's just a point of view on how the data industry has failed to create a clear enough message around the benefits of data and thus failed all of us. When did data become oil? I can't remember exactly when I first heard the term "data is the new oil" but my memory vaguely places it amongst other marketing zingers like "data is a goldmine" (which was ironic to me at the time as I was responsible for an instance of the CRM system called Goldmine, but that's another story). We're talking between 2004 and 2010 here.. So around the time that cloud computing was kicking off and the big SaaS CRM revolution that came with it. Big Data was to emerge towards the back end of that time period. So now we kn