How much more profitable would your business be if you had, for free, access to 100 times more data about your customers? That’s the question I posed to the attendees of a recent big data workshop in London, all of them senior executives. But not a single executive in this IT-savvy crowd would hazard a guess. One of the CEOs actually declared that the surge of new data might even lead to losses because his firm’s management and business processes couldn’t cost-effectively manage it.