Uncaptured Data: Tier 3

Value-focused Definition of Uncaptured Data:

Uncaptured Data is data that is available for capture but is unintentionally not captured, either due to lack of awareness, lack of capability, lack of capacity, legal constraints, political constraints, or lack of organizational maturity.

Uncaptured Dark Data

Uncaptured data can be a good place to enhance an enterprise’s overall collective intelligence. It presents a good starting point to begin the proactive learning process and reduce interactions with unknown assumptions. Depending on organizational maturity this data can become known, and can be made available for capture.

Outside data can be found in external systems that are not interconnected and in various data sets external to the enterprise. Much of it is lost at the point of capture due to flawed systems or because the technology at the opportune time of capture was not up to speed, while the rest we are completely unaware of. Uncaptured data can be found or lost in a number of places. For example, maybe 10 percent of participants don’t respond to a survey, a small segment of participants drop out from voluntary clinical trial over time, or a system outage results in the loss of numerous customer web form submissions. Ideally in these scenarios, organizations have a version of a services tier with graceful degradation to capture all submissions in near-source cache, but not all enterprises will.