The Fifth Phase

The connected world offers the potential for radical new business insights gleaned from previously unimaginable volumes of data. But business has got bogged down in the process of collecting and storing that data; money has been wasted on data lakes in which many IT departments have drowned without being able to deliver useful insights to business leaders. Big data has new and exciting answers to offer, but business leaders must first decide what questions it would like to see answered. Data may be the new oil, but to date we have only built oil depots. This book analyses the new, Fourth Wave of business transformation, which will build the refineries that turn data into useful products. Business has started from ‘data up’ and needs to start again from ‘value down’, going back to the drivers of real business value and deciding what insights would help realize that value. Only then can we begin to interrogate data with purpose.