Last month, in reaction to the “Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data” paper that made the rounds, Stephen Few from the Business Intelligence community wrote an interesting post:
The notion that “we need more data” seems to have always served as a fundamental assumption and driver of the data warehousing and business intelligence industries. It is true that a missing piece of information can at times make the difference between a good or bad decision, but there is another truth that we must take more seriously today: most poor decisions are caused by lack of understanding, not lack of data. The way that data warehousing and business intelligence resources are typically allocated fails to reflect this fact. The more and faster emphasis of these efforts must shift to smarter and more effective. Although current efforts to build bigger and faster data repositories and better production reporting systems should continue, they should take a back seat to efforts to increase the data sense-making skills of workers and to improve the tools that support these skills.
This is a point that I wholely subscribe to, and an aspect of which I encountered the other day when attempting to use web search engines to satisfy my “hidden cafes in prague” information need. Continue reading…
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