What’s the most important thing in real estate? According to the old saying: location, location, location. But the sentiment can also be applied to enterprise master data.

Keeping track of your physical assets: devices, tools, equipment and real estate, to name a few, already requires managing and maintaining large amounts of information. Where are your assets? Who is using them? These are typical questions companies encounter on a daily basis and their answers are critical to maintain efficient operations. Errors in this information and delays in accessing asset data can result in loss of productivity and higher costs. But what happens when your assets start generating data of their own?

It must have been somewhere around the third mile, err—fifth kilometer, of that evening’s quest that it started to dawn on me. This was something truly different. Here we were—me, my wife, our two boys (ages 5 and 7) and ever-accommodating infant daughter, trekking through an open field near our home in search of cartoon monsters. Ostensibly our destination was the picnic pavilion in the park near our house, but more precisely it was the virtual waypoint located at the pavilion being displayed on our two iPhone screens. We were headed there to re-stock supplies that would aid us on our digital quest to find, hoard collect and train Pokémon. All so that they might one day compete in anime-style gladiatorial combat in service of our family’s honor.