It has become Common to talk about data being the new oil. But a recent piece from WIRED magazine points out problems with this analogy. Primarily, you must extract oil for it to be Valuable and that is the hard part. Framing data as oil is not illuminating for executives trying to value their data assets. Oil is valuable, marketable, and tradable. Without significant effort, data is not. Data has more in common with land that may contain oil deposits than it does with oil.

Framing data as a real asset may help executives understand its value.