Russel Conwell, the famous orator, minister and founder of Temple University, gave a famous lecture on finding your own “personal acre of diamonds.” As the story goes (and I may get some small details wrong here), there was a wealthy farmer who had all he needed in life to be secure and happy. Wealth, health and family. During a chance meeting with a stranger, the stranger told the farmer that diamonds were the most precious and most valuable stone on earth and one could not truly be wealthy without them. The farmer became obsessed with the pursuit of diamonds for once he had diamonds, he would have true wealth. He set about looking for diamonds. Diamonds were already discovered in abundance on the African continent and the farmer sold his farm to head out to distant shores in search of the rare stones. He wandered all over the continent, as the years slipped by, constantly searching for diamonds and wealth that he never found. Eventually he went completely broke and threw himself into a river and drowned somewhere off the coast of Spain.
Meanwhile, the new owner of his farm picked up an unusual looking rock about the size of a country egg and put it on his mantle as a sort of curiosity. A visitor stopped by and in viewing the rock became so excited he could barely contain himself. He told the new owner of the farm that the funny looking rock on his mantle was about the biggest diamond that had ever been found. The new owner of the farm said, “Heck, the whole farm is covered with them” – and sure enough it was.
The farm became known as the Kimberly Diamond Mine. It is the richest diamond mine the world has ever known. The original farmer was literally standing on “Acres of Diamonds” but instead of looking in his own property, he sold that very farm to seek diamonds on a distant continent.
Think about this story as it relates to your business. You could consider data in the your business to be like the farm in the story, laden with diamonds simply waiting to be extracted. How many businesses do you suppose there are that spend inordinate amounts of energy, time and resources searching for key answers from outside experts, outside data vendors, and external market information. Surely, someone out “there” has the answers. But what if the answers, like the diamonds, are right there in your very own backyard. You only need the tools and the desire to mine them. The idea of “data mining” in the traditional sense is not what I’m referring to. Simply producing reports of different views of data hoping to find some diamonds is not the answer. If instead you develop and organize specific critical business questions and apply the right type of analytics against your data, you may find the diamonds you seek.
Every day I hear clients say, we need to acquire better data, we need more data, we need to buy a new set of data from the vendor, and in some cases… I need a new data vendor. I often ask, “What are you doing with the data you bought last year, or last week?” After a shrug, the reply is typically, “Well that data is old, I need new stuff, because that is what my competition is buying…new stuff.” While I’m not diminishing the value of current information, is getting more and more data really the answer? Is new data and fresh data the only thing that matters? Not if it is going to sit on the shelf like the last 50TB of data you accumulated.
If used properly, discovering patterns in your historic data can yield tremendous insights. Consider this fictitious example: every year between May 1 and June 1 on the East Coast for the past ten years new car buyers were more likely to buy white 4 door sedans than any other vehicle. If you simply focused on this month’s numbers you’d miss that pattern and the opportunity to overstock white 4 door sedans in late April on the East Coast.
Is there an equivalent in your business? Are there undiscovered opportunities sitting in your data right now? How many of these diamonds are you searching for on a distant continent instead of in your current data store? The answer may be to start looking in your own backyard. It is very likely that you have a lot of data and have yet to harvest the diamonds. The key to beating your competition may be using the very resources that are sitting quietly in a spreadsheet or database just waiting to be harvested.
Tags: analytics, data, data analysis, data mining, diamonds, farm, story