Examine a Slam Let's say you are an executive for a company that produces data security software. Your growth market is electronic commerce, or e-commerce. The agent's search on the uncontrollable Internet is producing thousands of new headlines each month. This short list alone contains news on such a wide variety of events that no manager would want to wrestle with it, let alone use it to determine a tactical or strategic move. THIS data deluge is to conduct a gap analysis.
Gap analysis compares the competitive information a company needs with what it actually receives.
If CIOs conduct a true gap analysis of their organizations' internal data pools, they will likely find little relationship between the enterprise's competitive needs and the data feeds. Yet the audit trail of activity in the system would reveal a steady stream of data and disk drives that are nearly full. What it can't evaluate is the quality or usefulness of this information. Volume is easy to discover, value is not. Executives should be wary of the most likely contributors to the data gap.