“Business schools often spend a great deal of time discussing the concept of unprofitable customers. An unprofitable customer is a customer that costs you more to keep than you make off of them through their relationship life. Ideally, you do not want to service or keep your unprofitable customers assuming that you have correctly identified them. For instance, a single customer may be unprofitable to you on a standalone basis, but serves to bring in several profitable customers whom you might not have without that single unprofitable relationship.
The science and art of determining and pruning unprofitable customers is more difficult in some businesses than others.
The same concept of profitable and unprofitable customers nevertheless applies to your data. In nearly any environment, with enough investigation, you will likely find data that adds shareholder value and data that is dilutive to shareholder value as the cost of retaining that data on its existing storage solution is greater than the value
that it creates. Just as we may have customers that are more costly to service than their total value to the company (even when considering the profitable customers that they bring along), so do we have unprofitable and value destroying data.”
—Michael T Fisher & Martin L Abbott, The Art of Scalability: Scalable Web Architecture, Processes, and Organizations for the Modern Enterprise.
