[open-government] data is a liability

Thu Sep 17 22:30:42 UTC 2015

source: https://www.richie.fi/blog/data-is-a-liability.html

> Data is not an asset, it’s a liability 
>
> 10 September 2015  by Marko Karppinen
> 
> If you work in software development, sooner or later you learn that code is
> a liability — all things being equal, the less code you have, the better off
> you are.
> 
> This is because code slows you down. Code equals complexity, and complexity
> makes it hard to change things and move forward. Code also has bugs, and
> bugs will make you spend time chasing after them. Code makes it harder to
> scale up, because it makes onboarding new developers more difficult while
> simultaneously hurting the productivity of even the most senior members of
> your team. The list of downsides goes on and on and on.
> 
> This, of course, is the in-the-trenches view. Ask top management, and they
> are very likely to view code in the opposite way. It’s a valuable asset for
> which the company has paid dearly in developer salaries and consultant fees.
> 
> The same dichotomy is beginning to emerge in our attitude towards data. The
> big data megatrend has taught companies in general and publishers in
> particular that user data is hugely valuable. And unlike code, data seems
> almost free: user activity generates an essentially endless amount of it.
> You just need to write it down on a disk somewhere.
> 
> On the proverbial business end of a big data operation, different viewpoints
> appear. As with code, more data makes things more difficult. When the amount
> of data gets truly big, so do the problems in managing it all. IDC estimates
> that big data companies will sell $125 billion worth of solutions to those
> problems in 2015 alone. These direct costs are huge, but they are dwarfed by
> inherent risks in storing unbound amounts of private user data.
> 
> Regulatory compliance is a factor that big corporations, publishers among
> them, may be uniquely suited to tackle, but the business risks of storing
> data are manifold. Nobody wants to be the next Ashley Madison, but the even
> bigger risk is breaking the trust of users in more mundane ways.
> 
> Here’s a hard truth: regardless of the boilerplate in your privacy policy,
> none of your users have given informed consent to being tracked. Every
> tracker and beacon script on your web site increases the privacy cost they
> pay for transacting with you, chipping away at the trust in the
> relationship.
> 
> So data is a liability with an ongoing cost. But what are we getting for the
> price? The all too typical corporate big data strategy boils down to three
> steps:
> 
>     Write down all the data
>     ???
>     Profit
> 
> This never makes sense. You can’t expect the value of data to just appear
> out of thin air. Data isn’t fissile material. It doesn’t spontaneously reach
> critical mass and start producing insights.
> 
> The solution we at Richie advocate is simple. You don’t start with the raw
> data. You start with the questions you want answered. Then you collect the
> data you need (and just the data you need) to answer those questions.
> 
> Think this way for a while, and you notice a key factor: old data usually
> isn’t very interesting. You’ll be much more interested in what your users
> are doing right now than what they were doing a year ago. Sure, spotting
> trends in historical data might be cool, but in all likelihood it isn’t
> actionable. Today’s data is.
> 
> This is important, because it invalidates the whole premise of storing data
> just in case you’ll need it later. You simply won’t, so incurring the cost
> of storing and managing and safeguarding it makes no sense at all.
> 
> Actionable insight is an asset. Data is a liability. And old data is a
> non-performing loan.
> 
> Marko Karppinen is Richie’s founder and CEO.

-- 
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