The core of any business is the value it delivers to their customers. Regardless of the method, it comes down to relationships and processes. The relationship between the vendors, customers, and even peers. The repeatable processes that allow for a high quality and consistent product. We forget that humans have been conducting business for centuries in the forms of bartering to exchanging money.

The one thing that hasn’t changed over the years is the involvement of technology in the process.

In the beginning, this was just the simple act of writing. Then came the abacus to perform simple math. Methods of farming and industry brought us higher productivity. Then came the punch cards to aid in tabulating financials, telephone and telegraph for communication, and the computer to bind everything together.

Over the years, there is one fundamental change followed by the development of adjacent technologies to better utilize this core tech. Lets look at one such concept: the address book. This is something that started life as a list of names and addresses. As the telephone was invented and became more commonplace, the concept of phone numbers entered into the equation. At first, just a single number, and then multiple to account for the office. Lastly, as computers became more popular, e-mail became the primary way to reach out while the original purpose of the address book became less used.

After all, when was the last time you wrote a physical letter beyond the Christmas card?

This goes to show that looking at one fundamental function of how to keep track of contacts, the underlying data can change over time. Also, depending on the age, there could be a lot of data. Depending on the processes and systems developed over time, what makes sense to one person can be unreadable to another.

Now imagine you just bought that address book, but it is your target company’s customer base.

Could you make sense of it on day 0?