Eric M Russell (9/30/2014)
Extracting useful information from terrabytes of data could perhaps be compared to extracting gold from sand. It takes an exceptionally rich source of sand to begin with, plus people with know how, plus investment, plus hard work. Of course there have been many commercial failures and outright scams over the years resulting from the quest to get a return on investment on this type of thing; both data and sand.
Sure, I would agree with mostly with that because it would be the act of extracting data that relates to a conversion or lead to data that did not in my industry. But, having data that showed what did work and what didn't work is still based on results to justify what did work and did not work to the end user. The value I feel is increased when you can show both versus one or the other.
It's extremely more beneficial than say a retail store, which can likely only report on what is selling. They cannot easily extract data on how many times a particular product has been viewed, walked by or even picked up and put back down compared to an online store that pretty much tracks users on every page thanks to advance tagging systems from Google and more.
That said, I'm not trying to say that all data is the same and is worth a lot to however. It really depends on the use and everything it took to get to that use such as hardware, software, development and more. I've heard of companies that have drowned in technology trying to get bigger data or currently drowning to maintain it. Then the use is not really as beneficial as they initially thought it would be for predictive analysis and decision making. But, it just really depends on a number of other factors too, which make having the data so much more valuable for so many uses.