The Evolving Enterprise

"We have only two sources of competitive advantage:
1. The ability to learn more about our customers faster than the competition
2. The ability to turn that learning into action faster than the competition"

Quotation is attributed to Jack Welch, CEO General Electric

If Jack Welch’s assertions are true (and I believe they are) then
there is a major disconnect between the way enterprises currently
think about data management and how they should be thinking about it.
If rapid learning from customer data and acting upon that learning are
the only real sources of competitive advantage then why aren’t
enterprises worrying much more about organizing data to efficiently do
just that? Why is the focus of data management today on basic tasks
such as storage, retrieval and querying for reporting? This can’t be
right.

I expect this situation to change quickly. Over the last few years
there has been a rapidly accelerating effort on developing powerful
new analytical architectures, and these technologies are creating a
growing appreciation that enterprise data has been an enormous
unrealized asset.

If monetary value really can be extracted from new analytical
technologies in a way that very quickly generates returns of many
times cost, then enterprises will be quick to implement these new
technologies. What enterprises need right now more than anything else
is hard evidence that this can actually be done.

Rather tantalizingly, what we will see in this accelerating market are
widening gaps between the technically possible and the commercially
proven, and between the commercially proven and published case studies
in the public domain.

Here at Causata we like Jack Welch's words quoted above. It would be
hard to more succinctly express the essence of what Causata's software
encapsulates as a product than Welch’s points 1 and 2.

Paul.