What is DATA?

In the world where we are currently discussing terminologies like “BIG DATA” & “NO SQL”, it’s hard to even imagine anyone mentioning much less discussing the big bad wolf “DATA” or "ANALYTICS" from data. But as far as I am concerned, I would say that we all may be missing the big picture here. In our attempt to stay abreast with the latest technologies, we might not be focusing on our core requirements or IT architecture.

Imagine an organization which has the latest techs and is collecting lots of data, but without any understanding on how to use it or does not have need for it or is unable to process this data, we would be just become a huge data source undoubtedly losing our core company operations then even all of the techs and “BIG DATA” might not be able to save us from drowning deep in GOD knows’ what, while we take our organizations to GOD knows’ where.

Even the best of projects without a proper and defined direction can be misleading. Imagine a scenario where the Marketing or MIS Manager comes to a board meeting with social analytics which suggests inventing a new open source product. Does this analytics really help us or is it just some random data from people who have no idea what your core products are into? Is this data even relevant to our business? How can we say that the data collected is genuine and no manual interventions were made during its collection? What is our basis to quote that this data was safe from any and all tampering? How can we bifurcate or prune this data to give us the “ANALYTICS” which could be useful for our future decisions?

We have seen many good managers & leaders go this way only never to be heard again because they either goofed up or were unable to contain the sanity of the project due to the growing data sizes. But the effects of this mistake have always been so big that the entire organization would definitely have to fall back at least some years to undo the effects.

Do we have so much time and can we really afford such a goof-up? In fact the big question of this time should be, “Do we need this big data now?” & if yes, then, “Do we have tools good enough to get the ANALYTICS from this data?” because big or small, data without proper analytics seems as a ship without a rudder. What do you have to say about it?