And, the early experiences tended to confirm this view. But then reality set in when firms began to deploy the scanner data and the associated information systems. Here are some of the descriptions I have heard about the results. This is a case of cancer of the information system. A new kind of cancer I call infocarcinoma .
Advanced stages lead to analysis paralysis.
Symptoms of infocarcinoma include an excess of information that distracts, rather than helps, decision making, and a focus on assimilating large amounts of information versus acting on insights. The result was the design and deployment of information systems . If you have this tool format these data so that the user can get meaning from them, you end up with information, not data. But that approach was out of step with the nature of the data. They are too voluminous, they arrive too frequently, there are too many ways to break them down into meaningful reports, and the computing tools tend to be too wimpy.