2.1 Data ist the new oil: imperatives of digital business

Today every company needs to do digital business. There is a lot of evidence how digitalization has disrupted traditional business models and how it has blown away 70% of the "Fortune 1.000" companies from the list in just on decade. The role models for the upcoming age are companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, AirBnB, Uber, etc.

When a company decides to take on the challenges as well as the huge opportunities of the digital era, it also accepts to play to the rules of this business which in essence are:

1. Everything which can be digitalized will be digitalized
2. Mobile first
3. Survival of the fastest

What we see is the dematerialization of our world at a breathtaking speed fueled by intelligent mobile devices (not only smart phones but also sensors, robots, etc.) which allows us to communicate and to do business at any time, everywhere, with anyone.

While oil has been the essential  resource in the industrial age, data will be the oil of the digital age. For digital enterprise everything depends on what data they have and what they are capable of doing with it. Or, if you want to put it into a simple formula:

Success in digital business = (data quality) x (ability to process huge amounts of information in real-time)

Data quality is about consistency, accuracy and availability of data. Just like a diesel engine will not run with gasoline, digital processes will not run with wrong and outdated data.
The ability to process big data volumes it is not only about the ex-post analysis for future decisions. It is about finding the best solution out of millions of alternatives in a matter of milliseconds – and then executing on it. Whenever I talk about processing of big data volumes in this blog, I have transactional processing with embedded analytical capabilities in mind.