A friend of mine likes to visit boot fairs and low value auctions. He’s got a great eye and will often come home with a delicate set of antique silver spoons, bits from an old grandfather clock or some old table.

“Very collectable,” he will be heard to say of his early morning bargains as he sets about restoring furniture or giving the brass on a magic lantern a bit of a rub. Stuff is repaired and piled up in various rooms in his house. His plan is that he will sell most of it on eBay, and indeed he has made some killings with items bought for a few pennies being sold for hundreds of pounds. The problem is that while he may sell a few things every few months, each week he is accumulating far more.

And there is the rub. If he was able to get on top of his ever increasing pile of clutter he would generate a not insignificant second income, but he has a fulltime job and sees his rummaging and collecting as a hobby.

And how many businesses may have the same challenge? When it comes to digital data, businesses are increasingly rich, data is piling up across different databases, but are they succeeding in building “Big Data” and extracting the maximum value? No, inevitably they are not, especially when the data is not seen as a primary revenue source.