Companies do many things to grow profits. They discover new market opportunities. They sell more effectively. They innovate. They delight their customers. They improve productivity. They find ways to cut costs and mitigate risks. It can be difficult to do these things in today’s economic environment, because revenue opportunities are not always abundant and executives are largely disinclined to make substantial investments in new business capabilities. Despite current conditions, businesses are still finding ways to significantly improve their performance on a daily basis. One of these ways is the aggressive pursuit of data profit. Data profit is what results when companies make economically optimized use of all the structured and unstructured data already residing in existing systems across the enterprise to get better at everything the business needs to do: discovering opportunities, selling, innovating, delighting customers, improving productivity, cutting costs, and mitigating risk. Data profit has become an especially compelling business strategy today, because companies now suffer as never before from a specific problem that is the very opposite of data profit. That problem is data waste. Data waste occurs when companies do not fully utilize the wealth of data that they already have. This problem has become highly prevalent because companies have implemented so many systems over the past decade or more – from high-end databases and applications to email and basic desktop productivity tools – but have not developed effective strategies for fully leveraging their collective information output…. Data profit vs. Data waste: Boosting business performance every day in the real world with information optimization