Here's a low-cost, low-risk idea with potentially high value for your company: Take advantage of some of the old data that you have stockpiled by applying new analytical techniques to it.

This idea, from computer information systems professor Robert Plant, has the potential to make CIOs look very good. Plant calls the kind of insight that might result from it a "NASA moment," based on the space agency's recent re-analysis of lunar seismometer data that had been gathered between 1969 and 1977.

"Needless to say," Plant writes at HarvardBusinessReview, "delving into the archives was a lot less expensive, time-consuming and risky than sending new seismic probes to the moon would have been."

Gleaning new value from archived data isn't necessarily simple, however. First you have to analyze it forensically, determining its format and why it was gathered. Then you can create a semantic map using this kind of metadata so you can figure out how to best use it. Plant relays the experience of Geotrace, a developer of advanced seismic-processing techniques, which took a new look at data that had been collected from an oil field drilled 15 years earlier. After re-analyzing the data, the company's client decided to drill a new well, significantly increasing production.

Plant suggests five steps to ensure that your data can be put to its best use not just today but years from now as well. One way to make information "future-friendly" is by writing accompanying technical documents that spell out how it is used and where it might be limited. You can also have analysts record videos with further explanations of the data.

For more:
- see Robert Plant's post at HarvardBusinessReview

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