"Oh, we've got loads of data"

“Oh, we’ve got loads of data” is really becoming a warning sign rather than ~
a good sign. 

I love understanding cause and effect as much as anyone but I keep 

finding that the sheer volume and availability of the stuff has actually 

buried any meaningful analysis in ecommerce businesses. 

 

The businesses that report having “loads” of data also seem to be the ones
that have siloed data, and data that seemingly no one actually is
responsible for within the business. This is the complete opposite of
“we have loads of insight”. It's much more than semantics, it's a descriptive 

phrase.

 

I’ve recently been invited to review “loads” of data to see if any of it might
be useful to answer the important questions we were addressing. 

Having been down that road before, I opted to save us all some time
because stray data is very rarely good, usable (comparable) or reliable.
It had a definition and a purpose at some point but that’s been
forgotten so it’s either just sat somewhere going out of date or just
continued to amass into a terabyte blob. 

So I elected to save all of us some time and focus on capturing the
new data we need consistently, reliably, proportionally, compliantly and
crucially making sure that it doesn’t just remain “data”, that it
becomes insight and changes processes for the better. 

#tuesday #data #tarabyteblob #consulting #ecommerce