"Data is the oil of the 21st century," said Gartner's senior vice president of research Peter Sondergaard during his keynote at Gartner's supply chain conference. Going through the notes of my conversations and the sessions I attended at the event in Phoenix, it's an apt analogy. The value of data-and the consequences of not having the right data-was a theme that tied them together. In fact, data is more like the shale oil of the 21st century: We're discovering that there's more of it than we ever imagined; its key to making the digital economy hum; and yet, like shale oil, we're going to need a whole new set of tools, technologies and processes to extract it from our systems and use it to optimize our supply chains.
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