new york times

The Dow falls, fantasies follow

January 27, 2016 by Ted Cuzzillo

The Dow goes down, and everyone asks why? Was it about the Chinese economy? An impending recession? The price of oil? Does anyone really know? Probably not, but that won’t stop people from telling stories that purport to explain — and some that throw fuel on the fire.

Do you find these stories as annoying as I do? Even when I know nothing of the reasons or even many of the facts, I just listen and moan. So often they have as much to do with the real cause as a cave man’s stories did about angry spirits and lightning.

Uber and AirBNB hint at BI’s future

February 2, 2015 by Ted Cuzzillo

You may have seen yesterday’s New York Times story about ratings on Uber, AirBNB, and similar outfits. Customers rate providers, but providers also rate customers. And guess what: As coarse as a five-point scale may seem, actual ratings tend to be worse. Forget the shades of gray, you’re probably either terrific or terrible.

Welcome to a chilling thought. This is what a “data driven culture” could be among the late adopters— a warning those of us who worship “data-driven culture” should be careful what we wish for. Is the failure of business intelligence’s failure to penetrate beyond the present beachhead such a bad thing? The Times story makes me wonder: Which comes first, tools or intelligence?

As important part of intelligence, we might say, is the ability to perceive subtle meaning. At least that’s the assumption underlying the design of most data analysis tools. No one needs SAS, QlikSense, or any of the others to recognize a gold mine glinting in the sun. But we do need data analysis to reveal the vein that, by the thinnest of margins, could turn a profit. And so-called “big data” offers even finer resolution on that picture, letting analysts study questions from many new aspects.

Perhaps you dispute the Doodler’s point. You say that the Uber example has nothing to do with data analysis. You say that the problem is in data quality! That would imply that those who submit data with hamfisted abandon would analyze that same kind of data with a sensitive touch — very unlikely.

What’s more likely is that, if true, the Uber and AirBNB experience portends a dark future for “data driven” cultures.

Read the Times story here. “Ratings Now Cut Both Ways, So Don’t Sass Your Uber Driver”

Where data analysis is a nightmare

April 18, 2011 by Ted Cuzzillo

There are the dream organizations that deploy data analysts wisely. Then there are the nightmares, such as the I.R.S. as portrayed in David Foster Wallace’s last novel, The Pale King, reviewed yesterday in the New York Times.

… In a universe of veiled and veiling numbers, the task of drawing the true [data] out into the light and holding them up for inspection, clear and remainder-less, really is a sacred one. … The problem, as I.R.S. recruits soon discover, is that neither moral nor heroic codes hold true anymore.

These recruits work with “excruciating difficulty … in an age of data saturation.”

The [instructor] presents “the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world’s constituent info generated . . . now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling and organizing that torrential flow of info.”

One character is the data psychic, Sylvanshine, who can “glean trivia about anyone simply by looking at him.” But, as if to prove that good data is far from the end of the story, he has a problem.

[He] is “weak or defective in the area of will.” Nor, due to endless digressions, can he complete anything. No one can; in “The Pale King,” nothing ever fully happens. That this is to a large extent a metaphor … becomes glaringly obvious when we hear one unnamed character describe the play he’s writing, in which a character sits at a desk, doing nothing; after the audience has left, he will do something — what that “something” is, though, the play’s author hasn’t worked out yet.

Let’s see, will an “easy to use,” “speed of thought” tool help? Is there a tool for Sylvanshine and the others?

No, at least not until the next update. But this is why business intelligence is fascinating. Under cover of tools and data, we touch the heart — throbbing or dead — of the organization.