Is data valuable for an enterprise?

There is a recent post on Information Management where people questioned and debated about the value of data itself to an organization.

As a general assumption, most enterprises value data as "valuable asset" for themselves. Whatever is kept in their IT systems is useful for creating business benefits. However, people always have to put data into certain context, such as a business process like "sales," "marketing," and "credit profiling", in order to create the value based on these data. On that sense, the data itself does not seem to be a valuable asset until the moment it is dragged into the context.

Well, this is an interesting observation or argument. But I would definitely question what is "data" to an enterprise. When a customer record is written in the database table at the IT system, this piece of data is already put into a context, i.e., the business definition of a customer to this business organization, and the business rules applied to this customer. And since this moment, this piece of data is creating value for the business. How? There can be few reasons.

1. The customer record is in fact the hard evidence that a business transaction happened. This transaction information lets the business organization have a legal way to protect its business. When a customer comes and ask for a refund or modification of certain product or services, the data kept in the system is a legal protection of what should or should not be considered. One could argue that I am using a certain context in this example. However, I would then ask when and how can you find any piece of data which has nothing to do with the business on any context? If that happens, why would you need data into the IT system?

2. In certain business domains, such as banking and health-care, keeping the data (I mean archiving) is a necessary need from a regulatory and compliance perspective. If an organization in these domains cannot fulfill this requirement, its business has to stop.

So, data in an enterprise is definitely a valuable asset. Why? Because you will lose your business if you do not keep data.