Marketing, at least in the IT sector, has been replaced by memes. Every so often a Gartner slide deck goes viral, and the next thing anyone knows, pithy and mostly meaningless phrases and sayings are driving Fortune 500 strategies. Execs commit to multi-billion-dollar initiatives to make sure that their companies are perceived as being hip or cool (or, to use the more typical phrases, competitive and lean), big projects get greenlit, and at the end of the day, after a forced death march, the system goes live with a great big “meh”. Those same execs may see one or two quarters boost from the system of a couple of percentage points, but then the hemorrhaging begins anew.

The meme-factories recently spit out the meme “Data is the next Oil”. Translating from the Memespeak, what I believe this expression is intended to imply is that the data within your organization is valuable and that if you do not transform your organization to more effectively utilize that data, you will get left behind.

The problem with this is that it is true only for a small percentage of companies or for a limited period of time. Read More