Gregory Maciag: Addicted to Data

Thursday, 18 April 2013

Addicted to Data

I like Kristin McMahon's post about bad data. She uses lively language and the story of the three little pigs to focus attention on the importance of data management. In particular, she warns us about “feeding our real-time addiction for data consumption—with complete disregard for the accuracy, reliability, or trustworthiness of the data”.

Addicted to data – there's something in this. Have we become too attached to our vision of an always-on, always-busy world? Are we churning data just for the sake of it, hoping for miraculous discoveries to leap out at us? Have we actually given up driving the business in the belief that technology will somehow deliver the future we want, gift-wrapped on schedule?

But I don't think everybody is affected in this way. Not everyone gets addicted to data. When the first PCs and spreadsheets arrived, everyone got hooked on tabulating and graphing data. Most of us got through the novelty phase and went on to live healthy, productive lives... The same will happen with big data. At first, surfing the new waves of data will be exhilarating. But people will get used to it quickly. And then the real work will begin.

In the meantime, we need to heed McMahon's warning. However much we use data, we need to be using data that's clean, reliable and represents what we think it represents. In the discipline of data management, considerations of volume must never outweigh considerations of quality. SAP

Posted on Thursday, 18 April 2013 in Data | Permalink

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