Business by Numbers Can Dull Creativity at the Workplace

WE LIVE in a world in which data accumulates at an unprecedented pace. The world produced 1,200 exabytes (billion gigabytes) in 2010 and is likely to reach more than 40 zettabytes (thousand exabytes) by 2020. At the same time, business surveys, also in SA, confirm that companies lack the capacity to extract any "valuable insight and predictive analytics from the mass of customer data that continues to multiply inside and outside their enterprises". Thus, in spite of finding creative ways to dissect the wealth of qualitative information available, many find it easier to (over)rely on a few numbers, which purport to be able to synthesise the variety of information coming from the real world.