Let’s remind ourselves to not get too centered on the numbers and lose deal with the choices we’re making an attempt to make.
As know-how has superior by way of the so-called Data Age, and information storage has turn into cheaper — we’ve got been holding onto a lot of knowledge. We retailer information that’s many orders of magnitudes previous gigabytes and terabytes and petabytes. And all that information bought saved in databases.
And management rejoiced. Mountains of knowledge!
We had information on product onboarding and utilization, advertising and marketing and promoting, gross sales — all the pieces. It was all there. Simply have a look at all these 1s and 0s gleam within the solar! This was, and nonetheless is, the information period.
The issue is, uncooked information doesn’t precisely exude “data”.
As soon as we began accumulating all this information, we realized it wasn’t sufficient to have it, we would have liked to get some worth out of it. So we began creating options like information warehouses, information lakes, even information lakehouses. The promise of those options was to, by way of totally different methods, extract data out of the uncooked information. By means of this we had been in a position to flip these 1s and 0s into numbers on dashboards. “Data”, if you’ll.
And management rejoiced. Dashboards galore!
With combination values, we are able to assign a good-to-bad scale. That beforehand uncooked information was remodeled into such helpful metrics as:
- Onboarding completion charge — excessive is nice, low is dangerous (proper?)
- Instrument utilization time — excessive is nice, low is dangerous (proper?)
- E mail open charge — excessive is nice, low is dangerous (proper?)
- Advert click on charge — excessive is nice, low is dangerous (proper?)
- Income — excessive is nice, low is dangerous (proper?)
This was (and nonetheless is) the data period. The issue this time is,
“data” is a reasonably grand time period for a bunch of numbers that don’t truly inform us of what’s occurring behind all of the values. Why is it good or dangerous that these numbers are the numbers?
