AUGUST 2017 / NO. 2
TAGS: UNSTRUCTURED DATA, NASSIM TALEB, BIG DATA, BLACK SWAN, PETER DRUCKER, COMPANY RADAR ROOM, IT

Defense and offense data, and crucial other dimensions

“Less than 1% of unstructured data is analyzed, 70% of employees have access to data they don’t need, and 80% of analysts’ time is spent in simply discovering and preparing data”, HBR M/J 2017
“The more data you research, the more patterns you discover which are purely a coincidence. In addition, these patterns will not repeat themselves. Computer-power has enabled us to create the buzz word of Big Data”, Nassim Nicholas Taleb author of the Black Swan and Antifragile
The quotes are dramatic. The IT-world would like us to believe that Big Data is a success, with the emergence of all kind of data-management functions, data scientists, chief data officers and others. You might ask yourself how effective all of this is in the absence of a coherent strategy for organizing, governing, analyzing and deploying an organization’s information needs. The quote by the renowned author of the famous book “The Black Swan” is also clear in this regard. In the 2017 May/June issue of Harvard Business Review, Thomas Davenport draws a distinction between data defense and offense, and other crucial dimensions.
Defense data means minimizing downside risks and includes ensuring compliance with regulations, using analytics to detect and limit fraud, and building systems to prevent theft. Data offense supports business objectives such as increasing revenues, profitability and customer satisfaction. Another dimension is the difference between a Single Source of Truth that might work at the data level, and Multiple Versions of the Truth, which supports the management of information. Finally, there is the difference between data architecture and information architecture. ‘Data architecture’ describes how data is collected, stored, transformed, distributed and consumed, while ‘information architecture’ governs the processes and rules that covert data into useful information. According to Peter Drucker “information is data endowed with relevance and purpose”.
“If you torture data long enough, it will confess”

Impact on strategic intelligence

If the vast majority of companies struggle to enrich their data, you might ask yourself how is it that they are able to transform information and knowledge into intelligence. It is alarming that only a limited number of companies have state-of-art strategic intelligence in place, meaning those organizations have made the transformation from data, information and knowledge to full-scale intelligence. Those organizations have strategic intelligence-driven strategies in place, delivering real-time insight and foresight as to the crucial potential changes and dynamics that the company will face. The result is those courses of actionable intelligence which top management cannot ignore. The Company Radar Room is the place to be, as it allows management to overcome facing the most-asked question in business today, namely: “Why didn’t we see this coming?”
“Do you think you can still be in business tomorrow, if you continue to use yesterday’s management methodologies and techniques?”
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