Skip to main content

Departing From Common Sense

A local government agency that deals with a lot of data wanted to use the services of a hometown entrepreneur ( a guy I am acquainted with) who "does Big Data" to help them figure out what Big Data could do in concert with their traditional Business Intelligence platform. I am sure there will be a way to fit a solution to a problem that does not completely exist. Reading this Forbes article about the key themes in the Big Data space was interesting to me for a couple of highlights cited :

Banana production in Central America is twice the rate of trash production in New York City - as an example of the hidden nuggets of wisdom you may glean from crunching through a ginormous amount of data. Being that there is a market for everything, the thought is it may be important for someone to know the precise relationship between banana production in Central America and trash production in New York City. 

That is the holy grail of big data analytics - to uncover stuff like this. The there is the next level of detail - how to keep the flow of such nuggets coming in at a steady clip and how to derive competitive advantage from them. There are any number of product companies out there who promise to do one or both. But the quantitative details on their case studies are sparse - an irony considering all they deal with is data and way too much of it.

The second relates to the obsolescence and irrelevance of KPIs in the brave new world of Big Data

..old-fashioned Business Intelligence (BI) with its insistence on pre-defined Key Performance Indicators (KPI) is no match to big data analytics, which does not require pre-defined “schema.” 

Not sure what KPIs have to do with having a pre-defined schema(or not)

..big data delivers “a command center that shows you what’s happening, not a dashboard with 40 KPI.”

It would seem commonsenical that when the deluge of data and factoids is upon us and our critical analysis abilities as humans is not skyrocketing to keep up, that we may need some help in the form of structure. Those old fashioned KPIs may be what it takes to introduce method to the madness.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Carefree Wandering

There are these lines in Paul Cohelo's Alchemist that I love about the shepherd turning a year later to sell wool and being unsure if he would meet the girl there But in his heart he knew that it did matter. And he knew that shepherds, like seamen and like traveling salesmen, always found a town where there was someone who could make them forget the joys of carefree wandering. What is true of the the power of love and making a person want to settle is also true of  finding purpose in life. If and when a person is able to connect their work to purpose they care about, the desire for change disappears. They are able to instead channel that energy into enhancing the quality of the work they are already doing. As I write this, I remember S a brand manager I used to know a couple of decades ago. He worked for a company that made products for senior citizens, I was a consultant there. S was responsible for creating awareness of their new products and building awareness of what already ex...