Recently, The Economist proclaimed that data is now the most valuable resource in the world, taking the No. 1 spot from oil. While some may quibble with that bold claim, it’s clear that data is the juice that runs the new economy.
It’s an apt analogy. Oil and data have much in common. Oil, in its pure form, has a lot of intrinsic worth but little practical value. It has to be refined before it becomes the gasoline that runs our automobiles and creates the manufacturing materials that produce the enormous range of petroleum-based products.
Similar to oil, data has to be filtered and processed before it has any true worth to your day-to-day business. Information collected and stored by your club management software and other resources has to be organized, analyzed, and put into context before it can serve your strategic objectives.
That’s easier said than done, of course. We’ve become so good at collecting data that we have more than we can handle. This has led to a new condition in modern business culture: infobesity.
Infobesity is a type of information overload that overwhelms business owners and their employees. Instead of being enlightened by data, you end up wasting time, or worse, making strategic errors because you misinterpreted the information or just gave up due to its complexity. Infobesity has been called “the enemy of good decisions” and a major cause of “analysis paralysis.”