“…We are in many respects surrounded by gauges and dashboards, tachometers and GPS devices, calorie counters and performance metrics. Data mining and data journalism and data-driven application development, and now, data marketing and data-based business practices, are logical extensions.

As streams on the web (both personal and private, public and corporate) proliferate, gathering, analyzing, visualizing and publishing data become increasingly important to businesses of any kind. Data is the best way to understand an opportunity, design an approach to it, and differentiate. Data is how we know we’re doing well, or faring poorly. Data is how we make decisions, at every level.”

Read more:

http://mashable.com/2010/01/06/data-business-impact/