The Importance of Data for Every Company in 2025

Most companies I've worked with don't have a data shortage, they have a data trust problem. There's plenty of information sitting in SAP, in spreadsheets, in half a dozen disconnected systems, but nobody fully trusts any single number enough to make a fast decision on it. That gap is what actually costs money.

By 2025, "we'll figure it out from the spreadsheet" isn't a strategy, it's a bottleneck. I've built dashboards that took a report from three hours of manual compilation down to about ten minutes, not because the data didn't exist before, but because nobody had built the pipeline to pull it, clean it, and present it automatically. That gap between "the data exists" and "the data is usable" is where most of the value is hiding.

Good data infrastructure isn't just BI dashboards with nice charts. It's the unglamorous ETL work underneath: reliable extraction from SAP or legacy systems, validation rules that catch bad data before it poisons a report, and a schema that makes sense to the next person who has to query it, not just the person who built it.

A dashboard is only as trustworthy as the pipeline nobody sees feeding it.

The companies that will move fastest in 2025 aren't the ones with the most data, they're the ones whose people trust the data enough to act on it the same day it's generated. That's an engineering problem as much as an analytics one, and it's the one I enjoy solving the most.