Big Data Hailed as Triumphant
January 30, 2013
We’ve tripped over more big-data cheerleading, and we are ready to say, “enough already.” The timpark.io blog trumpets, “Data Trumps Everything.” Oh, really?
Mr. Park uses the example of the modern supermarket to illustrate his assertion: the use of big-data analysis has eclipsed human experience and intuition. While information technology was adopted to assist the seasoned manager with time-consuming calculations, the write-up asserts that big data has now taken over. Using grocery-receipt data, software now analyzes a myriad of factors, builds sophisticated models, and directs in-store humans in order to maximize profits. Park notes:
“That Halloween expansion of candy? That wasn’t a guess – the supermarket knows down to a matter of hours of when to roll that out. This is an obvious example, but a data scientist at one major retailer confided to me that they have over 550 such rotations that happen in a year to capture ebbs and flows in certain products. Some of these are obvious, like Halloween candy or Valentine’s Day cards, that any human manager could have predicted — perhaps not with the accuracy of the data driven approach — but close enough. But the vast majority of these are changes that frankly they don’t completely understand, like that having a sale on cereal on Tuesdays results in 17% more profit in breakfast products during 2 week periods where less than 4 sunny days are forecast.”
Park is correct that this is now our grocery-store reality. He is even correct to extrapolate that many other types of business are following suit. However, going on to say that data trumps “everything” is, shall we say, a bit simplistic. Even at large retail chains, humans take ultimate responsibility for decisions, including whether or not to follow the suggestions of that pricey software they chose to buy.
Now, if Watson ever takes over as CEO at IBM, that will be a different matter.
Cynthia Murrell, January 30, 2013
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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