Their response was a nice letter with a printout of every store within ten miles of my zip code that regularly received the item I was looking for. Here is an organization that knows its data and how to use it to make a customer very happy. It is unfortunate that the success stories of leveraging data pale when compared to the untold failures and lack of effort across business and industry. Most organizations do not have a clue as to what their data is all about-never mind how to leverage it to best advantage. Without an understanding of the nature of their data, they have too much data and not enough information.
Data sources exist in an organization in many forms.
Some are organized databases and files. Some kinds of data are locked in arcane structures in legacy systems whose designers are long retired. Other kinds of data are in quick little applications that someone threw together as a temporary fix five years ago and have been in use ever since. Then, there are the stealth data sources that the organization doesn't even know it has. Today, organizations must change their information infrastructure quickly to satisfy rapidly changing needs.