I recently saw a YouTube clip of Erik Brynjolfsson, director of the MIT Center for Digital Business, discussing the concepts in his book, Wired for Innovation. Erik believes that we are only at the beginning of an era of IT-driven productivity gains. He cites companies like Harrah’s casinos that gather information on their customers with rewards cards who then use this data to model incentives to increase patronage from their clientele.

Erik talks about a recent trend in company data he has seen when comparing the top performers to the bottom performers that shows that the gap between these groups is widening at organizations that make better use of IT technologies to track historical business data. This is significant as the productivity of these two groups had paralleled each other until the current decade.

So what does this mean for a company’s storage requirements? With the competitive advantage Erik has shown in mining this data, there should be excellent justification in keeping more data around.

Check out the interview with Erik Brynjolfsson: