It is time to advance the narrative from calling data ‘the new oil’ to crowning it ‘the new oxygen’.
Oxygen, just like data, represents an omnipresent, more basic and vital element of survival, than oil. You can’t live without oxygen. Oil, you can.
Lack of timely access to necessary data (read oxygen), introduces the same risk to enterprise survival that lack of oxygen does to human survival.
Like oxygen, data is being created 24/7 vs. the only diminishing reserves of oil.
Oil has alternatives, oxygen doesn’t (or at least as yet).
Oxygen enables combustion that lights a fire, just like ‘data combustion’ lights up decisions, innovation, client experience, et all.
And interestingly, as supply of data (IOT, sensors, Wi-Fi, voice, objects, etc.) increases, so does its demand, and value. This is ushering an interesting new provocation to traditional economics theory where supply and demand generally share an inverse relationship – like in the case of oil. But, supply and demand for data (oxygen) seem to defy that inverse behaviour, as more supply of data is only creating more demand for it. They are BOTH moving in tandem – NORTH!
Hence, requesting all stand – as we crown a more worthy representative of the value of data – OXYGEN.