What: An essay on the nature of data, and why the whole conception is misleading (and meaningless).

Why it is important: Success stories as reported in the media can be overwhelming, and lead retailers into making the wrong strategic decisions when it comes to addressing data in the broader view of their digital transformation.

Benedict Evants, a tech columnist and former associate at Andreesen Horowitz, reviews the current ongoing and generalized discussion about data and its ownership. According to him, seeing data as the new oil is a misleading conception, and so is the dream of having a decentralized web architecture where everyone could own and monetize his or her data.

He reminds that data makes sense only at the macro level and that the notion of individual data makes hardly any sense (at least from the capitalistic point of view), let alone its monetization. For him, data is valuable only in the aggregate of millions of grains, this is why for him, data is not oil but sand. In addition, he also reminds that data is a broad word that refers to many different things, contrary to sand where each grain is the same.  He gives the example of Instagram data, that would be of no use for an electricity company. Talking about “data” as a generic concept does not have any meaning.

Instead of a collection of discrete units, data should be seen more as an expression of interactions within a network.

Data is not oil, it is sand