Chapter 15

Key Contextual Data Is Not in Your Company’s Databases

Oil is finite, but information is infinite.

—ERIC SCHMIDT, FORMER CEO OF GOOGLE

Life is infinitely stranger than anything the mind could invent.

—SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

A typical road to failure comes from a strategy that says, “Let’s build a really big data warehouse, then build our pricing capability and strategy from that base.” This plan simply does not work.

Why? Because no matter how large the database is, it will rarely capture the essential data required for pricing. The reasons for this are twofold:

The data in the data warehouse is captured for other purposes.

The likelihood that this data will also happen to support pricing strategy or pricing maintenance is quite low.

The former point doesn’t mean that information cannot serve multiple purposes. Rather, it reveals that if it is not gathered for pricing, the applicability will be coincidental.