Many people are getting excited about the potential of analytics and big data, writing about how, one day, we might be able to find any answer we want – about health, public transport, future sales, finding oil and gas – by gathering tons of data and analysing it.
The ideas are worth getting excited about, even though they haven’t happened yet (although I have read the story a couple of times about the teenager’s father who got upset after his daughter received promotional materials from a supermarket about a pregnancy. The father didn’t know she was pregnant, the supermarket had guessed she might be pregnant after seeing patterns in her purchases which pregnant teenagers usually make).
But another thing worth considering is the risk of people losing track of fact when they are buried in a sea of analytics.
In any job there are key facts that someone in charge of any organisational function needs to know. (For example, what their boss wants them to do, some key change which is happening that they need to respond to, or be aware of).
How can analytics software make it clear what is fact and what is analytics?
Or should be limit the role of analytics software very specifically as analytics – ie here’s a place you can go to, to get analysed data – which is a very different place for where you get your facts?
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