The “potential” power of Data
We have all seen the multitude of screaming headlines touting BIG-DATA, Internet of Things (IOT), Unstructured Data,
data warehouses, data marts, business intelligence, Data Lakes, Hadoop, Machine Learning, NLP etc... The list goes on
and on. The omniprescient, omnipotent promise of data reminds me of the erstwhile dotcom era of the late 90's and early
2000's where just the appearance of .com at the end of your company name was enough to grant you sky-high valuations
and a plethora of venture capital funding. We all know that the dotcom bubble burst and things came down to reality.
Data without insight is of no use. Data which does not provide us with actionable intelligence and predictive abilities, will
go down the same way as the Walkman and the VHS players of the past. Who cares how many gazillions of data is being
generated by connected devices, sensors, wearables, the web, social media, avatars, PlayStation and other digital
technology- if this data cannot be used and analyzed "intelligently" to find hitherto invisible patterns, trends and forecast
the future, it will not be valuable.
The political pundits in the current presidential election in the US had previously all predicted that Donald Trump was just
a flash in the pan and that he would not stand any chance of sustainability. The same was also prognosticated about Bernie
Sanders and how Hillary Clinton had nothing to worry about him emerging as a viable alternative to her, as the
Democratic nomination for the President. With the benefit of hindsight and the current state of affairs, we all now know
how horribly wrong those pundits' forecasts and predictions were. Apparently their crystal ball was not working at best, or
at worst, was diametrically mis-aligned to generate the opposite prognosis.
On the flip side, data when used intelligently to enhance decision making and leading to pro-active and strategically
aligned action, can be extremely powerful and valuable. Leveraging the right analytic tools on the right data sets, can
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