Collecting is a human obsession – similar for companies

Collecting brings objects overload – information overload

People like to collect objects
In most cases collectionners gather so much stuff the number of products becomes overwhelming. The objects collected aren’t used.

Companies like to collect data
Similarly companies like to register data about their events, statuses, customers and leads. Meticulously every piece of data has to be written down or entered in a software system for one reason or another.
Production data, customer data, lead data, product data, employee data, …
Companies collect so much data that they have not enough analysts to use or to analyze all the numbers.

Large companies can buy expert systems to crunch the numbers according to pre-programmed rules and could find trends or anomalies. Pre-programmed rules will only generate findings within the rules defined. These systems will not indicate new trends or disruptions.

The collecting problems
Problems with collected items are:
- The freshness
- Too much of the same
- No use but collecting itself

Further problems with data are:
- The freshness
- The level of detail over time
- The method for measuring should remain the same
These problems will make analyzes and conclusions even more difficult to achieve.

Still most of all the registered data rests useless just like the objects in a collection.

The usefulness of data

The usefulness of all this registered data becomes questionable as the projections into the future are based upon:
- A subset of all of the data
- An extrapolation of the current data

People in companies seem to have a tendency to register all information too, just like collectionners without any real purpose or benefit.

The Marketing data dilemma

Departments like production or human resources have the advantage of having all data within their own department.
Marketing has the additional problem of requiring data from many different sources internally and externally:
- Internally: website analytics, campaign data, event data, leads generated, appointments made, invoices printed, revenue.
- Externally: market data, competitor data, macro economic data
The marketing department has to cope with the problem of collecting and aggregating the data, which makes the analysis even more difficult due to the inconsistency and the overload of the data.

Of course if a company doesn’t register and measure, it will know less or very little.
The question is if all this collected data really needs to be registered.
What is the cost of all this registration and keeping the files?

What shouldn’t be collected in your company ?