Changing Tack: Evolving Attitudes to Open Source

I can think of many applications of data. For example can to improve the learning rate of MOOCs, how to teach effectively, how to detect great performers (for example for hiring), how to meet the kind of people able to inspire others (analyzing cliques in graph of social relations), how to get feedback, how to get a first impression of what products are the market demanding and how much are they going to pay for it, and many others. A gold mine for those that can extract the real value and significance of data, that is data analysts.

"Data" is a meme in much the same way "social" was a meme a few years ago. Every muffler shop was being told they needed to have twitter, facebook, myspace, linkedin, and G+ accounts else they'd be outpaced by more social-aware competitors.

That is patently false. There exists a short list of domains in which great value can be extracted from a strong social media presence, but outside those domains the value of social media remains dubious. Do I really give a shit if the Chevron gas station down the street is on facebook? Is PetroCanada going to steal my business by engaging with me on twitter? Of course not. When my fuel gauge reaches the point where I no longer have the warm-and-fuzzies, I fill up at the closest station with the lowest price that's the easiest to get in and out of.

The situation is analogous for data. Not every business or domain is going to be able to derive value from it.

Disclosure: I wrote the linked piece.

When discussing the potential risks of data-oriented models, it's necessary to recognize that all data isn't created equal.

Facebook, Google and others are obviously trying to accumulate personal information in an effort to advertise more efficiently, but there are other models that involve no actual personal or company data. Operational telemetry, for example.

I might not want to share the data from a MySQL database, for example, but its operational characteristics: size, query length, query speed etc are substantially less concerning.

A company like New Relic, for example, could provide a service like the now discontinued App Speed Index because it has visibility into a large number of running application instances. This data, particularly in an aggregate form, poses little or no risk to customers that share it, but can be valuable to businesses that see its potential.