What It Takes to Make a Perfect Storm for Data

“In God we trust; all others must bring data.” — Edwin R. Fisher

Picture this.
A world.
A new world.

It’s a world in which no one loses a friend to a hurricane because there wasn’t time to prepare.

It’s a world in which no one loses a family member to cancer because we didn’t detect the spurious growth of cells at the outset.

It’s a world in which every car is intelligent enough to avoid the crashes that would have killed us and the people we care for.

We don’t have to wait. We’re on the brink of entering this world.

It took us a lot of time and growth to get here. So, first, let’s look back at how far we’ve come.

Yuval Noah Harari, a brilliant historian, in his book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, divides the history of Homo Sapiens into four parts:

1. The Cognitive Revolution (c. 70,000 BCE, the dawn of imagination)

2. The Agricultural Revolution (c. 12,000 BCE, the development of farming)

3. The Scientific Revolution (c. 500 CE, the emergence of objective science)

4. The Industrial Revolution (c. 200 CE, the emergence of industry)

According to Wikipedia, we just passed the Information Age (also known as the Computer Age, Digital Age, or New Media Age) — a 21st-century period of human history characterized by the rapid shift from the traditional industry of the Industrial Revolution, to an economy based on information technology.

We’re now smack in the middle of the Data Age, where information is collected in your enterprise, on my Fitbit, and on a thousand other sources. We’re beginning a period when we can turn information and data into intelligent insights about the world.

Its history is long and complex, but the current story of data is simple: With three steps, you can truly unleash the power of your data.

#1 Make data simple and accessible
Collect data of every type, no matter where it lives, and achieve freedom from ever-changing data sources.

#2 Build a trusted analytics foundation
Organize your data into a trusted, business-aligned source of truth, and deliver the agility to put data to work in new ways.

#3 Scale insights on demand
Analyze your data in smarter ways, and incorporate previously unobtainable, evidence-based insights into your decisions.

That’s it. See? Simple.

Now, where are you and your enterprise on that data journey?

Are you doing great at collecting data, both structured and unstructured, and storing it? What about data quality and integration? And, the subsequent, data science methodology that you need to turn information into insights. How you are faring there?

Let me tell you a few data stories from my team at IBM:

• Discover how Nedbank Group saw demand for analytics surge across all divisions, after implementing a lightning-fast data warehousing platform from IBM
• Learn how IBM Db2 helps Groupe France Mutuelle simplify their IT infrastructure, accelerate critical business reporting, gain faster access to data while reducing investment and operating costs.
• Find out how 1800Flowers has built a master data management (MDM) system that helps them deliver a more seamless experience to shoppers across multiple brands and channels.
• Understand how FleetPride has leveraged SPSS Modeler to predicts the likelihood of warehouse staff making picking mistakes, which has enabled managers to take measures to simplify product labeling — now 99.5 percent of packing is error-free

In his book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, Harari closes with the following un-nerving question: “What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?”

Hariri’s question brings me back to my own earlier questions…

• Where are you on the data journey?
• Are you beginning to unleash the power of your data?
• How will you turn data and analytics into competitive advantage?
• Where do you think we’ll go as we begin to tap the gold mine of information and data — and turn them into insights for the betterment of humanity?