Bob London explains that a strategic narrative needs a sharp, memorable phrase at its core. "Zero dark data" refers to the hidden information organizations unknowingly hold: forgotten passwords, personal details, and other sensitive files that need to be found and eliminated before they cause harm.
Chapters
when you do a strategic narrative, this one happened to be over 10 pages of, and it's a story. Where are we today? Where do we see the market being? What are our customers' problems? But it's written in a very friendly way and engaging way, it's supposed to be. But there is a tip of the spear, where if you come up with a theme, well, you should come up with a theme, not a tagline, but something that is memorable and shareable that is relevant to the target audience and other constituencies. We get to the sharp tip of the spear on top of the strategic narrative and woven into it that ended up being 3 words that turned out to be very powerful, and they're right behind you— zero dark data. Why don't you tell us about what that means?
We wanted to incorporate what the problem was that our market was suffering, and at the same time, what the end result would be of resolving that problem. And dark data is a nice collective approach, if you like, to all the data that sits in an organization that they shouldn't have. And often data they don't know they have. Privacy data, PII, sensitive, toxic. Toxic's really important. Toxic could be things like password files that have been inadvertently saved and they've been forgotten about and left in the wild. And so that's another term we use, wild, data in the wild.
Just for context, uh, for people, is this 10% of your entire data? 10, 20, 50, 90?
So unstructured data is typically 80% of an 80%. Okay, but you might only need one file that could result in irreparable damage on a business. It doesn't have to be 2 billion files, which is right, right? But, uh, but dark data is an all-encompassing term to describe all the information that you don't know about that's out there in your organization across your networks, and that you need to find, you need to control, you need to eradicate it, and ultimately take it down to zero. If you get your organization to a point of zero dark data, it's, it's like a dream. It's like everything becomes beautiful. But nothing is thrown and shredded anymore. And so now we need a new system, a new way of addressing that. And if you can eradicate all that data, then everything else in the organization becomes more efficient. It becomes a force multiplier, massive force multiplier, because you're not dealing with— you don't have to keep bringing in compensating techniques, i.e., symptoms of the disease. You're actually dealing with the disease at source. And organizations literally spend hundreds of millions dealing with the symptoms, and they, they put, uh, effectively Band-Aids on all these things. Oh, we need more document records management, we need more content management, we need better search, we need more storage space, we need redundancy, duplicate, etc., etc., etc. We need better insurance policies to cover the risk. And what are they all doing? They're all trying to deal with the data which is out of control. And if the data were in control, all those other things which you probably still need become far more efficient and cost-effective.
