Why gaining agility through data starts with people

Almost any business will tell you, with very good reason, that its most important asset is its people. A services provider without people is just an empty office, a manufacturer just idle heavy machinery, and a health system just a collection of empty beds.

This truth is not going to change, but in recent years the picture of an organization's value beyond its people has been fundamentally transforming. Where different sectors might once have given very different accounts of where their value lies, today the second greatest asset is becoming, in the majority of areas, data.

More digitalized tools, infrastructure, and processes which are more highly connected have delivered an explosion of data which offers deeper insights into customers, more efficient operations, higher quality innovation, faster decision-making, and more besides. Data, in short, is promised to enable all the agility and responsiveness that businesses need to drive growth.

The ...