Will you still do what you want, even when the data tells you not to ?
Can you trust all your data ?
Nowadays, people always rely on data on some levels. Data tells people business results and also determines market researches. High quality and specific data is usually very helpful and reliable, but most of the time, data is not 100% reliable.
Stop spending too much time on data
The article Can You Trust Your Data? by Marion Wyncoll says that it is very complex to process raw data and eventually turn raw data into a workable data set. It is even harder to apply business rules and market definitions into a spread sheet of data. The author talks about four key parts to data management framework.
- data discovery
- data harmonization
- data curation
- data traceability
Data Discovery
Businessmen usually have to ask themselves a question before they discover data: what is already out there and what should I know that I don’t know ? In many cases, there is no data for businessman to discover that applies to the “should know but don’t know” part. In this case, there is no data for the businessman to begin with.
Data Harmonization
During the data harmonization phase, the author mentioned a very important point, which is “True and comprehensive data harmonization requires an experienced business partner who really understands the data sources, and can recommend the level of harmonization that is right for the therapy area”. Let along the difficulty of finding a trustworthy business partner, there is always a gap between the data and the reality, in other words, it is almost impossible to put an equation mark between data and the reality. In this case, it is always questionable to say that data harmonization could provide a business real value.
Data Curation
During the data curation phase, businessman have to face a severe reality — data life cycle. data is very easy to go out of date, which means it is very easy to become irrelevant to a business. Many people say data are meant to be updated. However, could data be updated as quickly as the changing speed of markets ? The answer is controversial.
Data Traceability
The author mentioned that it is very important to trace where the data comes from in order to ensure that the data is credible to deliver results. The author also believes that data transparency is important for a business in order to keep the accuracy for data. Unfortunately, traceability usually conflicts with transparency. If the data is extremely easy to trace, sometimes it’s a red light of data safety because competitors might trace your data as well.
Overall, it is extremely hard to trust all your data, but if you understand your business very well and have enough confidence of what you are doing, then you might not always want to do what the data tells you to.
Thanks for reading !
written by: Anna Q Liang
