While at one time it might have been acceptable for companies to capture just the obviously “important” data and throw the rest away, today leading companies understand that the value of their data goes far deeper. The decision about which data to keep and which to throw away—that is, which data will prove to be important in the future—is deceptively hard to make. The result, according to industry analyst Richard Winter, is that businesses must store and analyze data at the most detailed level possible if they want to be able to execute a wide variety of common business strategies.
