Data-Verse
“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.” — By Carly Fiorina, ex CEO of Hewlett-Packard
Paintings, handicrafts, graphic/web design, interior/exterior design amongst a lot of others show how creative the human race has become. Creativity in itself has no bounds and often leads to beautiful solutions to the problems we face in our daily lives. When we talk about Data Analytics and Data Science — they are cold processes. They come from a study of historical data and then try to formulate results.
These two processes might seem pretty contradictory to each other. One uses boundless imagination, the other uses the analytical study of data while solving problems. But are they that different or do they complement each other to bring life to solutions? Let’s try to unravel this topic together.
The Problem & its Solution
The first step is to identify the problem, as simple as that may sound. That is the hardest part of the whole process. Let’s try to understand that finding a problem is different from defining the problem. You could identify multiple problems as to why a product didn’t make an adequate amount of sales. But you still need to work on the why of the problem.
This is where creativity and Data Analytics can come together. While analyzing the data will show you the reasons for failure, creativity helps you define the problem and data helps in defining the what and how of the solution.
Lets’ see how they help each other:
a. Data helps in searching for the information and analyzing it.
b. While creativity can help in developing the hypothesis and creating different kinds of tests to find results.
So, does that mean data can help us do everything! Can it help me create my own DataVerse??
Let’s create the DataVerse
Data Science and Analytics stretch one’s limit of thinking beyond the capacity of data itself. I wouldn’t be diving into much of the technicalities in this particular blog. Rather we will take further dive into the realm of Data.
Let us start, shall we?
The fundamental reason for analyzing any data is to understand the behavior of users/products/teams and many more. But does it stop there? The answer is a one-word NO. When we analyze users behaving in a certain way on the website, what do we do — we strive to improve their experience. That’s how analytics ties up with creativity and holds the base of any premium organization intact.
Not convinced yet? Let us look at another example. We create an application that starts crashing. The analysts help us to understand where are the pain points — but they also point towards what could be done more than just removing the pain points.
And well, the best part is story-telling. What does a person need to narrate a good story — Data. Data storytelling can shape your business in ways we have only started to imagine. Woah! Are we going to use a bit of creativity here? Yes, we are. The beautiful dashboards are a way to mesmerize your clients. Data Analysts and Scientists work on those cold data points which seem not useful and convert them to those dashboards.
Since we have talked a bit about using data points. Let’s also understand — half baked data won’t help us. So, we have to bring all datasets into a singular place-either and present them on SQL servers, open-source databases, any other ETL tools. This setup is the most important step as it lays the foundation of any analysis that will be done. We will talk about these further in my next blogs where will discuss setting up data pipelines and analytics and ultimately use Data Science to create some products.
