Back in the day when work colleagues were allowed to smoke alongside us.
Back in the day when the office coffee machine dispensed very poor quality tea or coffee and occasionally a cocktail of both in the same cup.
And back in the day when the office computer took up a whole room, we had paper.
There was paper everywhere. Everything we needed to do was piled up on our desks. We knew exactly what was outstanding and what needed attending to. The pile was the system. Its height told us how busy we were. A cleared desk was a satisfying accomplishment. A teetering stack was an honest admission of how the week was going.
The invisible filing cabinet #
Now everything is up in the Cloud or stored on a server. We don’t get to see easily what is open and outstanding without accessing a report. And the screens we sit in front of look identical whether there is £10 worth of work stored on them or £10 million.
This is the quality that paper had which the screen does not: visible weight.
A filing cabinet full of client records creaked. It resisted. It occupied physical space and demanded physical attention. You could feel the accumulated work of months or years in the effort of pulling out a drawer. The volume of what you had was never in any doubt.
The computer doesn’t creak under the weight of information stored on it. The screen looks the same whether we are storing one byte or three terabytes. Whether our CRM contains fifty contacts or fifty thousand. Whether our pipeline holds three active opportunities or three hundred. The interface is neutral. It gives nothing away.
And this is not a trivial problem.
Dark data: a name for something you already knew existed #
Data professionals have a term for what you cannot see behind the screen: dark data. Gartner defines it as the information assets organisations collect, process, and store during regular business activities, but generally fail to use for other purposes.
Globally, an estimated 55% of enterprise data is considered dark: stored but never used for analysis or business decisions. Nearly one in three organisations report that 75% or more of their stored data is dark or obsolete.
That statistic, read alongside the quiet screen on your desk, is striking. More than half of everything stored in the average organisation’s systems: the contact records, the email histories, the call logs, the half-finished proposals, the client notes, sits there unseen, unanalysed, and not activated. It contributes nothing and generates storage costs.
Dark data isn’t just unused, it can lead to missed opportunities where valuable insights and revenue potential lie dormant, increased costs as even unused data requires storage and management and security and compliance risks as unmanaged sensitive data is vulnerable to breaches and regulatory violations.
The same goes for smaller businesses and sole practitioners, at a different scale but with the same underlying dynamic. The screen looks the same whether we have an actively managed, regularly cleaned, properly segmented contact database, or a decaying spreadsheet last updated three years ago. The interface is neutral. The value behind it is not.
The question this raises #
How can we more effectively tap into the value of the data stored in our systems? How can we interact with it better and create more value from what we own?
This is not a question about technology. It is a question about attention and intention. The data exists. The value is, as I wrote when I first thought about this, right in front of us. The challenge is that we genuinely don’t know what we have because nothing visible tells us.
Elsewhere in the Hub I ask how do we put a number on the data assets we own, so they stop feeling intangible and start being treated with the seriousness of any other business asset? The Tired Data piece addresses the maintenance question: how do we keep what we have from quietly decaying beneath the neutral surface of the screen?
This piece is about something slightly different: the perceptual problem that precedes both. Before we can value our data or maintain it, we have to see it. We have to develop the habit of looking behind the screen and asking what is there, what it is worth, and what it might produce if properly activated.
Treating data as what it is #
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, described data as a precious thing that will last longer than the systems themselves. That observation has aged rather well. The systems have changed beyond recognition since he made it. The data behind them: the records of human interactions, transactions, relationships, and interests, retains its value across every platform shift.
The paper-based desk was a crude but honest dashboard. It showed you, without needing to be asked, exactly how much was outstanding and what needed attending to. The digital equivalent: the report, the dashboard, the CRM view, is more powerful in every measurable respect. But it requires an act of intention to look at it. The paper demanded attention simply by existing in your physical space.
We are sitting in front of an infinite universe, as I wrote at the time of the original post. The question is whether we are taking the time to explore it.
“Our technological powers increase, but the side effects and potential hazards also escalate.” — Alvin Toffler.
The hazard Toffler had in mind was broader than business data. But it applies here. The power to store and accumulate data invisibly is also the power to let it sit unseen and unused, to mistake the neutral screen for an honest reflection of what lies behind it.
It isn’t. The value is there. It just doesn’t creak to let you know.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
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