Does your business have hidden data assets?

By Steve Gold (@stevewgold)

The Information Commissioner’s Office is holding a seminar on the opportunities and challenges around using anonymised information at the end of this month in central London.

You’re probably scratching your head and asking: why?

Well, the reason is that all manner of businesses, especially the larger ones, hold a lot of information on their customers – that’s you and me – and they rarely use this data for anything that isn’t directly to do with their businesses.

And given the scale of the Data Protection Act, not forgetting other regulatory governance such as Basel II and the Companies Act, it’s not really surprising because, as the elephant house cleaner at the zoo said: “one step wrong and you’re in deep doo-doo.”

The good news is that the information that businesses hold on their customers and dealings generally can be data mined on an anonymised basis – using suitable tools – and qualitative  “what if” database extrapolations and projections created.