Data is everywhere, just not where we need it
We’ve never had more data. Some think it’s the new oil, the new gold, the new soil, something of a revolution. Is it? Or are we just still humans stumbling around in the dark?
Earth observation satellites scan our planet, sensors (there are more sensors on Earth than there are people) track the movements of people and things, energy flows, air quality, water usage, and behaviours. Our global financial systems process billions of transactions a day. Most organisations, public and private, are drowning in dashboards, APIs, spreadsheets, data lakes, clouds, compute, applications, and now ‘ai’.
“Every age thinks it’s the modern age…but this one really is”
Dreams Rewired, Manu Luksch
And yet, when we need to make decisions that matter — how to finance a green retrofit, where to send emergency flood support, or how to measure progress toward net zero, the data we need is often hard to access or nowhere to be found. Or it exists, but it’s in the wrong format, in the wrong place, scattered across organisations and systems, under the wrong licence, or wrapped around the wrong market incentives, or just poorly governed and hard to trust.
Why is this important to our future?
We’re in an era where our financial economy is demanding ‘quality’ data from the real economy. Our financial systems have developed over centuries to measure, track, verify, use and report on the rate of change of ‘one dimension’: money. As we continue the shift to make our environment measurable, we must get the ‘exchange rate’ right between financial investment and environmental outcomes (climate, nature, air quality, water, biodiversity, and so on).
Right now the ‘exchange rates’ are all over the place and, importantly, as we step forward we need to measure the rate of change of many parameters, not just one: we need a step-change in how we think about ‘data’ and data sharing.
It’s hard to understate quite how far away the real economy is from generating financial-grade data
We’re still mostly in the 1970s. Environmental disclosures still rely on highly manual processes, despite widespread digitisation and hundreds of application vendors in the market, it’s still mostly clipboards and spreadsheets or, for 99% of the world, nothing at all. This is not a problem of data scarcity, it’s a problem of incentives, structure, and alignment.
We’ve built systems that are optimised for accumulation, not coordination. We have engineered data pipelines that extract value, but not the wiring to deliver reciprocity (shared benefits).
In the language of infrastructure: we’ve laid the cables, but we’ve neglected the grid
We are told to “make data-driven decisions” while simultaneously being denied the means to do so at scale. Meanwhile, we waste more time (and money, opportunity and emissions) trying to reconcile, reformat, clean, or even find the data than the actual decisions that we are trying to make.
The result is a kind of systemic gaslighting: we pretend that the data is ‘there’ when what we really mean is that it exists … but existing is not the same as usable, and very far away from trusted. Just because something is stored on a server doesn’t mean it’s infrastructure. Just because it’s digital doesn’t mean it’s useful. Just because it’s available doesn’t mean it’s accessible.
McKinsey (The data-driven enterprise of 2025) suggests that data professionals still spend up to 80% of their time preparing data rather than using it. This is the same number I have from over 25 years ago.
So where do we go from here?
Data is everywhere but until it flows to where it’s needed (when it’s needed, and with the right context) we’re not building a digital future we’re just building more digital noise
We need to stop pretending that technology (including ai) alone will solve this. We must stop framing data as a ‘commodity’ to be owned and sweated, and start treating it as infrastructure to be governed.
We must design for connection not monopoly control, for shared purpose not private hoarding. We must invest in the ‘boring’ bits: governance, legal standards, licensing, permission/consent, metadata, interoperability.
This is the stuff that doesn’t make the headlines, but makes everything else work.
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