Your Data Is An Asset - Here’s How Hawai’i Businesses Can Start Treating It Like One
The gap between businesses that treat data as an asset and those that don’t is widening. Research from McKinsey Global Institute found that data-driven organizations are 23x more likely to acquire customers and 19x more likely to be profitable than their competitors. For Hawai’i’s small businesses, which make up 99.3% of all businesses in the state and employ nearly half of the private-sector workforce, closing that gap is not just a technology decision. It’s a business strategy decision. (SBA Office of Advocacy, 2025 State Profile).
What Does it Mean to Treat Data as an Asset?
Think of data the way you think of a piece of commercial real estate. Left unmanaged, it sits idle and may even become a liability. But with the right structure in place - clear ownership, consistent upkeep, and a plan for how it generates return - it becomes something you can build on.
Data works the same way. Most businesses are sitting on years of customer transactions, operational records, and market signals that could inform smarter decisions - if the data were organized, trusted, and actually used. The problem is that for most small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), data is scattered across spreadsheets, email inboxes, and disconnected software platforms. It’s there, but it’s not working for the business.
Treating data as an asset means making deliberate decisions about how data is collected, stored, maintained, and used in the same way you would any other resource with business value.
Why this Matters More in Hawai’i
Hawai’i’s business environment has some characteristics that make data strategy particularly relevant. The state’s economy depends heavily on a concentrated set of industries - tourism, defense, construction, agriculture, healthcare, and professional services. Competition within each of those sectors is real, and margins in hospitality and food services are notoriously thin.
At the same time, Hawai’i’s geographic isolation creates logistical and cost pressures that mainland competitors don’t face to the same degree. Businesses that make smarter decisions about staffing, inventory, customer acquisition, and pricing have a structural advantage. Data is the tool that makes those decisions more reliable.
The economic case for getting sharper is also pressing. The UH Economic Research Organization noted in 2025 that Hawai’i faces headwinds from federal policy shifts, slower tourism recovery, and inflation - conditions that favor businesses with tighter operational control and better visibility into their numbers. (Hawai’i Business Magazine, 2025; DBEDT, Q2 2025 Statistical and Economic Report).
The Cost of Not Managing Data
Poor data quality has measurable financial consequences. Gartner estimates that bad data costs organizations an average of $12.8 million annually. While that figure reflects larger enterprises, the proportional impact on a small business (in wasted staff time, missed decisions, and compliance exposure) is equally significant.
The hidden costs show up in predictable places: employees spending time reconciling conflicting reports, decisions made on gut instinct because the right data isn’t accessible, customer records that are incomplete or duplicated, and regulatory requirements that are harder to demonstrate compliance with when documentation is scattered.
Non-compliance with data-related regulations carries its own price. Research indicates that the average cost of non-compliance is $14.82 million - significantly higher than the $5.47 million typically spent on maintaining compliance. For Hawai’i businesses in regulated sectors like healthcare, finance, or government contracting, this is a material risk, not a theoretical one. (Compunnel, “The ROI of Data Governance” 2024)
Three Practical Starting Points
You don’t need a large IT team or a six-figure budget to begin treating data as a business asset. The following three starting points are accessible to most SMBs and deliver near-term value while building toward a more mature data strategy.
Know what data you have and where it lives
Before you can use data strategically, you need a clear inventory. What systems are generating data? Where is customer information stored? Who has access to what? This is the foundation of data Governance - defining ownership, location, and accountability of your key data assets. It doesn’t require sophisticated software to start. A structured mapping exercise, even done in a spreadsheet, gives you visibility that most SMBs currently lack.
Identify one business question you can’t currently answer reliably.
Data strategy becomes concrete when it is tied to a specific business problem. What is your customer retention rate? Which service line is most profitable after accounting for labor costs? What are your peak demand periods, and how are you staffing against them? Picking one question and working backward to understand what data you’d need to answer it, and whether you have it in usable form, is a powerful diagnostic. It reveals gaps and creates a clear mandate for what to fix first.
Establish basic data quality standards.
Clean data is the prerequisite for almost every downstream use case - analytics, AI, compliance reporting, customer personalization. Basic standards don’t require a data engineering team. They look like: requiring complete contact information before a customer record is saved, standardizing how addresses or product names are entered across systems, and setting a regular schedule for reviewing and removing duplicates. Research from Ataccama suggests that a mature data management program can reduce time spent on manual data tasks by 33% in the first year, growing to 40% by year three. (Ataccama, “Expected ROI from a Successful Data Management Program” 2024)
Building Toward a Data Strategy
The three steps above are not the end state - they’re the on-ramp. A full data strategy aligns your data practices with your business objectives. It defines which data matters most, how it will be collected and maintained, who is responsible for it, how it will be used to drive decisions, and how it will be protected.
Across Hawai’i SMB industries, the pattern is consistent: businesses that establish a clear data strategy and basic governance practices are better positioned to adopt analytics, automate processes, and eventually deploy AI tools - all of which build on the same foundation of clean, trusted, well-managed data. According to McKinsey, data-driven organizations see EBITDA increases of up to 25%. (MIT Technology Review, January 2024)
Our Take
Data is already an asset in your business. The question is whether you’re managing it like one. For most Hawai’i SMBs, the starting point is not a technology purchase - it’s a decision about how seriously to take the information your business generates every day. That decision has measurable financial consequences either way.
Businesses that begin that process now - by taking stock of what data they have, identifying what they need to know, and building basic standards around quality and ownership - will be better positioned to complete as data becomes an increasingly decisive factor across every industry in the state.
Sources
Ataccama. “Expected ROI from a Successful Data Management Program.” September 2024.
Compunnel. “The ROI of Data Governance: Beyond Compliance to Competitive Advantage.” July 2024.
Gartner. Data Quality Market Guide (cited in Decube, “Driving ROI Through Data Governance,” 2024).
Hawaii Business Magazine. “A Year of Calm, With Uncertainty Ahead.” October 2025.
Hawaii Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism (DBEDT). Q2 2025 Statistical and Economic Report. State of Hawaii, 2025.
McKinsey Global Institute. “Catch Them If You Can: How Leaders in Data and Analytics Have Pulled Ahead.” McKinsey & Company, 2019.
MIT Technology Review. “Outperforming Competitors as a Data-Driven Organization.” January 15, 2024.
SBA Office of Advocacy. 2025 Small Business Profile: Hawaii. U.S. Small Business Administration, 2025.