Every Millisecond Counts: Why Time is Everything for Businesses

We want new data, and we want it 10 minutes ago.

Take text communication: once, a letter was incredibly valuable. It took weeks to compose, travel to the recipient, and be read. Then more weeks for the recipient to respond. The content of that letter had long-lasting value.

As email hit the mainstream and the internet got faster, the time it took for text communications to travel between writer and reader – and back – decreased to a matter of hours, or, in some cases, minutes.

Today, as we move to more collaborative and interactive environments, chat being the most widely-used, communication can be carried out in bite-size bits in just seconds. Data value is becoming short-lived, making time the most indispensable, invaluable asset a business can claim.

How valuable is data?

Information decay is a way to think of the rate at which the value of a piece of information decreases over time. As technology and more specifically data delivery capabilities, significantly increase, information decay has accelerated right along with them. And as the volume of information being delivered continues to grow, the value of each individual piece of data decreases, until the real power lies in immediate access to aggregated information.

For businesses, this is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because organizations are empowered to deliver innovative products and features faster than ever before, supporting businesses to make better data-driven decisions. However, end users’ desire for data that is truly real-time is insatiable. They want their data, their updates, and immersive connected experiences, they want them now, and they don’t want to miss a thing.

For the modern business, this means that time is everything. Users are ever more impatient, information decay continues to accelerate, and reducing the temporal disconnect between data and consumer can be the most powerful asset a business brings into play. To stay competitive, continue to innovate, and deliver on expectations, businesses need to take advantage of the time they have and squeeze every ounce of value from a short window.

In this eBook, we’ll look at the reasons that time is such a valuable asset to organizations, the dangers of businesses losing time, and what technologies and design patterns businesses can harness to get the most out of time.

Why is time the most vital asset to a business?

From consumer apps to analytics, eCommerce to financial trading, the most successful and innovative businesses understand and have embraced time as their top asset.

In the consumer world, consumers crave the instant gratification of receiving goods or information in real-time, when it’s most relevant. Analytics and reporting companies’ primary success factor is delivering the most relevant and up-to-date data information to anyone subscribed. And across all businesses, engaging customers at the right time, and making decisions based on accurate, up-to-the-second data is the one true differentiator.

What it comes down to is: do we have, or have we delivered the most valuable, most current data available right now? And how can we utilize the time we have to make the most impact?

Time management of data and experiences must be at the forefront of any business’s strategy. With a short window to deliver an engaging environment, deliver and enrich data, or transport a single piece of data, the most successful businesses will dominate based on how they managed time.

So, what is there to lose? That’s what we’ll look at in our next part – What businesses lose when they lose time.

Want in-depth analysis? Check out our full eBook Every Millisecond Counts: Why Time is Everything for Businesses.