Most of us have heard about the “three V’s” of data: volume, variety and velocity. Yet there’s a fourth “V” that is getting plenty of attention these days, especially in the C-suite: value. This is leading one particular executive at Dell EMC to encourage others in the enterprise computing world to think about the value of data in different ways.

“Most of our customers don’t give a hoot about the three V’s of big data. They care about the four M’s of big data: Make Me More Money,” said Bill Schmarzo (pictured), chief technology officer of Dell EMC’s global services big data practice — also known as the Dean of Big Data.

Schmarzo visited theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile livestreaming studio, and answered questions from hosts Lisa Martin (@Luccazara) and Peter Burris (@plburris) during DataWorks Summit in San Jose, California. They discussed ways to truly evaluate data’s value and how Schmarzo is seeking to train the next generation of business executives in data science. (* Disclosure below.)

Viewing data as an unlimited supply of oil

Schmarzo compared data to a resource that can power the world’s industrial economy. “Imagine if you had a barrel of oil, a single barrel of oil that could be used across an infinite number of vehicles and never be depleted,” he said. “That’s what data is.”

The challenge is that many executives don’t first come up with a clear understanding of what they want to accomplish with the data they have, Schmarzo pointed out. “If I don’t know what I’m trying to do, then I don’t have a way to value the data,” he said. “The value of that data comes from putting it into use to make better decisions.”

Schmarzo has been teaching a business course at the University of San Francisco. He recently completed a project with his class where he was able to help an unnamed company double its identification rate for customer attrition.

“If we can get the business stakeholders to understand what’s possible with data and analytics and then you couple them with a data scientist who knows how to do it, we see exponential impact,” Schmarzo concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of DataWorks Summit. (* Disclosure: Hortonworks Inc. sponsored this DataWorks Summit segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Hortonworks nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE