So in 2006, apparently, a Tesco researcher and architect named Clive Humby first scratched out of the metaphorical soil the nugget that “Data is the New Oil,” and a kind of gold rush followed, with many a pundit repeating and elaborating upon the idea in the ensuing decade-plus debate, and even a load of contrarians who’ve come along and declared that Data is NOT the New Oil, or challenging the precision or validity of the metaphor.
Various spins on this idea are possible and have probably been tried:
- “data platform” as a kind of “oil platform”…
- data mining and “drilling down” as the exploitation of mineral resources
- Analytics as the “internal combustion engine” to put data to work
- … and so on.
For me, the zenith (or the nadir) came when ill-fated Intel CEO Brian Krzanich offered the now-commonplace chestnut “Data is the New Oil” in an interview with Forbes Magazine– about two weeks before his abrupt resignation.
As the age of the Customer Data Platform as universal customer data hub dawns, though, I’d like to offer a novel mineralogical metaphor of my own, though: Customer Data is the New Plutonium.
Bear with me on this, I think it’s actually kinda new and pretty valid, or at least thought-provoking, as are all the best metaphors.
- Naturally occurring precursors of customer data can be extracted from the landscape all around us: point of sale/transaction data, web traffic data, cookies, email traffic, connected car data, videos captured on our Nest devices, our own selfies, call data records (with the infamous “metadata”), call center recorded interactions, use of government services, medical event data, TV viewing habits from our DVRs, online gaming, loyalty programs, beacons in shops, what have you.
- The nucleus around which these data points coalesce, however, is a kind of synthetic element — a unique, artificially generated digital customer identity, originally partial and rather diffuse, almost quantum-mechanical in its fundamental uncertainty. Look at it straight on, for some business purpose, and a fixed answer emerges and is assumed to be enough; look away or move to the next task, and it’s fuzzy again.
- Some types of data seem innocuous on their own, but when collected, correlated and concentrated, they become… “radioactive” — on the one hand, capable of powering a lot of activity, because it’s been unified; but on the other hand, becoming toxic, and even explosive, if handled incorrectly or maliciously. (Witness the concept of “toxic joins” in a database, where the security framework on the database should be able to recognize and block attempts to join certain classes of data– usually to prevent uncontrolled deanonymization.)
- Storage and handling of such data is, rightly, highly regulated.
- From the customer’s side, this is the financial life of their organization at stake; from the perspective of the individual data subject, the stakes may even be much higher, such as identity theft or fraud.
- The consequences, regulatory and otherwise, of its release are extremely dire.
- When a lot of such data is collected in one place, it becomes a target for criminals, nefarious state and non-state actors, and even terrorists to raid, exfiltrate and weaponize.
I’ll be turning back to this idea periodically, I think, since I love a good metaphor, but for now I welcome your comments on the core idea.