Distracted by Data
What we risk by hyper-focusing on “data” as a problem to solve
In 2018, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Every Company is Now a Tech Company” arguing for the importance of a strategic plan and vision around a company’s use of technology. Earlier this year, The Economist published an article arguing that data has surpassed oil as the world’s most valuable asset. In 2019, we can safely say that every company is a data company.
From corporate board rooms to committees on the Hill, to the G20 and beyond, the “data” conversation is everywhere. In the last year, there were more than 100 data-related legislative proposals in the U.S. alone.² Google searches for “data protection,” “data governance,” and “data management” are surging.¹ And while no one can argue against the prominence of data in the public psyche and discourse, we still don’t have a good answer to this fundamental question — “what is data?”
It’s not for lack of trying to define it. The number of “data as ____” metaphors proliferates daily, with some of the more commonly-cited examples including “data as oil,” “data as property,” “data as water,” “data as labor,” and “data as nuclear waste,” and the list goes on. I most recently heard a computer programmer at MIT propose a “data as a vector” metaphor (based on the notion of vector data, having a starting point, duration, and…
