Dun & Bradstreet’s Sara Mathew on the Innovation of Data Management

Dun & Bradstreet’s Chairman & CEO Sara Mathew discusses how essential it is for businesses to continuously adapt to the growing amounts of data our society creates, uses, and tracks. Mathew’s explains the “Big Data Problem”, which addresses the ever-growing amount of information that businesses are struggling to translate, store, and manipulate it in such a way that it becomes valuable to customers. She goes on to say, that from the beginning to time until 2003, it took our civilization to create 7 exabytes of data, which is about 1,000,000 terabytes of information. Today, the exabytes of data society creates doubles every fives years. Mathew says D&B sensed this “data exhaust” issue a few years ago and took the initiative to completely transform their infrastructure to handle up to 30 times more data than they are able to now. This new platform will allow the company to innovate using the software to test, learn, change, respond, and help them bring new products and services to market quicker, in a cost-effective manner.

Mathew’s shares her confidence in D&B for continuing to innovate with changing economies and technologies for the past 170 years it has done business. In 1963 D&B created a organizing mechanism to handle an influx of information; the DUNS® Number (Data Universal Numbering System). This unique 9 digit number is assigned to single business entities for keeping track of companies and also easily links corporate family structures together. Today, the DUNS® Number is a common standard worldwide, with a database containing more than 140 million entries for businesses throughout the world.

The exponential growth of data is inevitable, but Mathew explains if companies continue to find new ways to innovate and manage, store, and manipulate the information to produce valuable insights, they will be better positioned in their industry. Access this week’s episode on demand now!

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