Session 3 - My Warm Fuzzy Data Blanket

This week reinforced several key lessons in data management that I strive to remember but always forget:
1. Use unique identifiers
2. Make every piece of data queryable and extractable
3. Don’t take shortcuts in either of the previous steps

This week also led me to consider something that I had not thought about before – people like data. People like the idea of having large pools of data underlying their decisionmaking process. I recently finished the book “Blink” by Malcom Gladwell, and he spent a chapter discussing a large military decisonmaking simulation. On the blue side, military bigwigs invested millions of dollars in a datacrunching toolset designed to reveal all the intricacies of the enemy’s decisionmaking process and deliver a surefire victory. On the red side, there was a crotchety old general who was big fan of thin-slicing (making instinctive decisions based on limited amounts of data). The crotchety general won the exercise while the datacrunchers were still playing with their databases.

One of Gladwell’s main points throughout the book is that lots of people thin-slice, but people are not necessarily comfortable with decisions made through thin-slicing, because they cannot explain the detailed process of how they came to the decision. Data is comfortable and gives people a warm fuzzy feeling, even when it lends no new insight to the decisionmaking process and becomes a resource-consuming waste of time.

I think that people like to carry around lots of data – even data that they never use – because having data in your pocket is like having two extra tubes of lipstick that you never wear, or a handful of expired credit cards, or bonus cards to stores that you never shop at. You hold onto everything that was useful at some point, because it might just be useful at some point in the future. In the meantime, you continue to live and breathe and make decisions without it. Of course, in today’s world, it is very likely that someone will steal your data before you have the opportunity to need it again, and they will find plenty of uses that you never dreamed of.