Mastering the Universe of Data
Posted: Tue Feb 11, 2025 3:48 am
Just a few days ago we had fun discussing these learnings and my background in the 90th episode of Catalog & Cocktails, our podcast at data.world, with colleagues Tim Gasper and Juan Sequeda. When I reflect on these hard-earned lessons today, the biggest insight to keep in mind is that data are simply facts about your business or organization – and we’ve never had them in such abundance, even as we often fail to use them. Because the much-evolved utility of data, its governance, and this new and expanded business playbook are really about these relationships of facts. In sum, they add up to what at data.world we call agile data governance and the emerging concept of data meshes, which I wrote about on this blog in March.
Every CEO, COO, CFO, and management team operates at the nexus of these connections of facts. This is the ecosystem of suppliers and customers and all the facts they generate and animate. It’s the cosmos of inbound facts on sales and prospects, outbound facts such as marketing or promotion, and accumulated facts such as records of operations to date. This web includes capital: physical, financial, reputational, and human. This commercial sphere includes capacities: the skill and intellect of the team, the productivity of machines and software, and the scope of digital infrastructure. The hard facts of the cambodia whatsapp number data environment – interest rates, unemployment rates, supply chain efficiency, government policies, competitive pressures, and commodity prices – are the frame around this ecosystem. To some degree, a version of this organizational choreography has been the lot of the business leader since the dawn of commerce, much like it was for Sam Walton and the techniques he pioneered.
Every decision is made at the intersection of some subsection of this array of elements. But now, all wired together, the sum of the interactions among all of these elements – these facts – are logged and charted as data, in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. It’s worth reminding ourselves that the estimated 100 zettabytes of data stored in “the cloud” – enough to fill the standard hard drives on about 40 billion Mac laptops – resides in a technology launched just in 2006 with the advent of Amazon’s first cloud servers at AWS.
Mission Control - SpaceXWhat this means is that we can optimize our businesses as never before. With $11 trillion erased from global stock markets in the first five months of the year, the NASDAQ off 26.5 percent as of last Friday, Elon Musk musing about his “bad feeling,” and Dimon predicting a hurricane – either a “minor one or Superstorm Sandy” – now would be an awfully good time. Except that, as I wrote in February, outside of the FANGs and a few other tech behemoths that have truly mastered their universe of data, very few companies have effectively done so.
Instead, executives remain in the dark. IT departments rush between data silos to the point of exhaustion, as thousands of data engineers rush to the door amid the Great Resignation. As detailed in one of our favorite books, Winning with Data by Frank Bien and Tomasz Tunguz, teams literally brawl over decision-making in the absence of accessible and verifiable data. This will only accelerate if we panic. Kevin Kelly, the towering thinker and author whose books include The Inevitable, on the emergence of this new data-based economy and society, has described us as being captured by a “counterforce,” as we reflexively “hoard data like gold” rather than use it.
Every CEO, COO, CFO, and management team operates at the nexus of these connections of facts. This is the ecosystem of suppliers and customers and all the facts they generate and animate. It’s the cosmos of inbound facts on sales and prospects, outbound facts such as marketing or promotion, and accumulated facts such as records of operations to date. This web includes capital: physical, financial, reputational, and human. This commercial sphere includes capacities: the skill and intellect of the team, the productivity of machines and software, and the scope of digital infrastructure. The hard facts of the cambodia whatsapp number data environment – interest rates, unemployment rates, supply chain efficiency, government policies, competitive pressures, and commodity prices – are the frame around this ecosystem. To some degree, a version of this organizational choreography has been the lot of the business leader since the dawn of commerce, much like it was for Sam Walton and the techniques he pioneered.
Every decision is made at the intersection of some subsection of this array of elements. But now, all wired together, the sum of the interactions among all of these elements – these facts – are logged and charted as data, in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. It’s worth reminding ourselves that the estimated 100 zettabytes of data stored in “the cloud” – enough to fill the standard hard drives on about 40 billion Mac laptops – resides in a technology launched just in 2006 with the advent of Amazon’s first cloud servers at AWS.
Mission Control - SpaceXWhat this means is that we can optimize our businesses as never before. With $11 trillion erased from global stock markets in the first five months of the year, the NASDAQ off 26.5 percent as of last Friday, Elon Musk musing about his “bad feeling,” and Dimon predicting a hurricane – either a “minor one or Superstorm Sandy” – now would be an awfully good time. Except that, as I wrote in February, outside of the FANGs and a few other tech behemoths that have truly mastered their universe of data, very few companies have effectively done so.
Instead, executives remain in the dark. IT departments rush between data silos to the point of exhaustion, as thousands of data engineers rush to the door amid the Great Resignation. As detailed in one of our favorite books, Winning with Data by Frank Bien and Tomasz Tunguz, teams literally brawl over decision-making in the absence of accessible and verifiable data. This will only accelerate if we panic. Kevin Kelly, the towering thinker and author whose books include The Inevitable, on the emergence of this new data-based economy and society, has described us as being captured by a “counterforce,” as we reflexively “hoard data like gold” rather than use it.