As I work with various clients around the country and around the globe, I find one thing to be true, data is just data. What I mean by that is simple, it doesn’t matter if you have a “Big” data problem or a small data problem, we are really just dealing in pieces of information. Information that needs to be structured and ordered in a way so that we can analyze it, slice it and dice it, and hope that it will tell us something valuable. That value can only be derived when we understand that the data is meaningless unless we can understand the context of the data, why it exists, what purpose it serves and what it actually means. There is a tendency for people to always want to jump into doing what is cool, what is the next big thing. Sometimes we have to do what is boring, before we can work on what is fun. With all the buzz around “Big Data” and “Data Science” everyone seems to want to jump straight into predictive analytics and advanced data mining, without doing the necessary leg-work to get to that point. There is not, to my knowledge, some kind of magical piece of software out there that will help you build and glean insights from data if you have no basic understand of what your data is. While models and data mining can tell you interesting patterns in your data, if you don’t have a basic understanding of your data, business practices, and customers, all that information is somewhat meaningless.
