Business Intelligence: A Magical Insight Machine?
September 28, 2015
I found “Thinking Outside the Big Data Black Box: Why BI Isn’t a Magical Insight Machine” interesting. The main point of the write up is that vendors well analytics platforms. The licensees learn that set up, tuning, expertise are required to make these often expensive systems deliver useful outputs.
The write up states:
Big data, or indeed any data, may indeed hold huge value, but it’s often looked at in the wrong way. When we are looking at data – collected from different sources, to address different motivations, with an ever-changing context – we can’t fast track every correlation into an actionable insight. We have to understand where the data comes from, the factors limiting its reliability, its consistency when applied across different sub-groups, and where biases may be lurking. We need to carefully interrogate any correlation, before we can understand whether it represents a truth in the real world.
Bummer. Smart software, flashy Powerpoints, and examples of Hollywood style graphics make data work fun, interesting, game like, right?
Not without effort.
The write up points out:
A straightforward analysis of historical data will spot factors that consistently cause cost overruns. But more sophisticated techniques and a bit of intuition can go much further – for example you may find short planning time is not generally correlated with cost overruns, but it is more strongly correlated with overruns in projects over a certain size. Most importantly, you need to understand why these relationships exist. If one factor consistently reduces costs, can you be confident it will continue to do so in a new market where conditions are different? If you don’t understand your data you can’t make such predictions.
After reading the article, I was shocked. I thought that today’s nifty systems eliminated the requirement to understand data, understand the mathematical option, and provide ready to use outputs.
Disappointed. I thought the quip about business intelligence as an oxymoron was a cheap shot.
Stephen E Arnold, September 28, 2015
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