can data control costs

Can data control costs?
A 60 watt light bulb uses 43200 kW-hr a month (60x720=43200). The average cost of a kW-hr is $0.10 so the cost per month is $4.30 or $51.60 a year. This is of course assuming that you leave a light bulb on constantly for 12 months. Now that is very unlikely but what about a TV, computer, alarm clock, video games, internet connection, answer phone etc etc. The likelihood is that most of us have a significant amount of appliances in the home that are either on or on standby.
With a little bit of research you can identify what in your household is on and how much it is costing you over the course of a given year. You can take this information and enter it into a simple spread sheet and with even rudimentary analysis you can work out how much you would save each year by simply turning off the appliances in your home.
If this is a little too geeky or “friends of the earth” for you try this instead, take all of the receipts you have in a given month from your local supermarket and enter that information into a spread sheet. Now try shopping on different days or at the start of a week rather than the end of a week. Pick some staple groceries such as bread and milk (beer) and enter the prices in the spread sheet as well. At the end of the month you will amazed at what rudimentary analysis will show up.
This is data, and analysis of data will show you costs, for example you will find that supermarkets have higher prices on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday than they do on a Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, firstly because perishables are stocked for the weekend so reduced during the week but secondly and more importantly because we like to shop for groceries at the weekend. Prices are also higher at the start of a month than the end of a month due to the same reasons. Now, admittedly we may only be talking about a few cents but they all add up.
This is a tremendous amount of work and tedious computer hours but what if you could buy a piece of software that did the work for you. What if you entered the variables or requested the software to look at certain items in a given month? What if that software looked at your local supermarkets in a 15 mile radius and worked out who had the cheapest milk and bread or beer? What if the software gave you information each day on what to turn off in your house to save money that night or gave you information that instead of shopping on Friday you should shop on Monday? What if the data that the software gathered and analyzed told you that you could save $50 a week, would you use it?
Turning data into actionable knowledge controls costs.