It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when people only collected data if they absolutely had to. The stereotyped images of the ‘70s office, with rows of filing cabinets and card indexes, spoke to a very different attitude toward data. You kept what you absolutely, positively knew you were going to need to refer back to — and nothing else. At this time, anything beyond a company’s core data was considered business waste. Data was a byproduct, not an asset. This was largely technologically driven. Even as we moved from paper to online, digital storage was slow, expensive and difficult to mine and analyze. Even if data was saved, it was often seen as write-only, saved but never referred to. Data was a liability — expensive to store and even potentially dangerous. However, as technology moved on and analysis techniques developed, things changed. Over the last couple of decades, there has been an ongoing shift in how we view the data we generate and collect.…