GIGO: A Reminder That Your Statistics 101 Class Was Important
September 12, 2015
You are familiar with GIGO, aren’t you? This is an old school acronym which is allegedly shorthand for “garbage in, garbage out.” Do not use this acronym with a civil engineer with a minor in wastewater treatment. Make a joke about a nuclear engineer.
Plus, gentle reader, I assume you remember your Statistics 101 class. The yap about sample size, data quality, various validity checks, and other assorted disturbances of an otherwise normal academic journey.
Now navigate to “The Most Important Thing to Know About Big Data: It’s Not About the Tools.” The write up in a rather pleasant way reminds me that software tools are less important than dealing with current information, accurate data, and complete, normalized data sets.
I know the “data lake” crowd dismisses these issues as trivial, irrelevant, or old fashioned (just like me).
I learned:’
So handling big data isn’t really at all about the tools but, instead, it’s about using them as a part of the process to arrive at the right decisions to meet the organization’s needs. Anyone who doubts that would do well to bear in mind the 10/90 rule put forward nearly 10 years ago by Google co-founder and digital evangelist Avinash Kaushik. He suggested that for every $10 invested in data analytics tools a business should invest $90 in people to actually extract value from the data.
I am not sure most of the Big Data hypesters agree.
Stephen E Arnold, September 12, 2015
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