Data powers it
“Data is the new oil,” mathematician Clive Humby claimed in 2006. By that, Humby meant both that it takes refining to have value, and that it would soon power the economy much like the commodity.
When many of us hear the word “data,” we imagine large amounts of records stored in tables containing information about sales or transactions.
But “data” is far more than that: it’s any facts or measurements used for reasoning, analysis or planning. So, the list of clients whose names you need to feed through a mail-merge is data. The log of hours you’ve tracked on a project is data. And the on-call schedule for your department is data.
See the data in everything
If data is really “the new oil,” then we should find it “powering” all parts of professional life, not just those in the data sphere.
And indeed, all the tasks I mentioned above require significant dexterity around using data: you need to capture it, check for its quality, disseminate it, and analyze it. Just because it’s not a gigabyte of click-by-click customer behavior, doesn’t mean it’s not data!
Working with schedules is working with data. Organizing content on a website is working with data. Tracking the status of projects is working with data. Maybe in these cases, your end goal is not to build a model or report from this data; but it’s data nonetheless. The rules of gathering, storing and ideally automating data still apply.
Chances are, much of your time at work is spent working with data, and you don’t even know it. It’s become such a part of our lives that we don’t even think about it. Looking back, it’s really amazing just how much every job I’ve had depended so much on managing data well. There was really no other way around the mountain, and this gulf indeed is what interested me so much in getting better at data.
I would encourage you to step back and consider all the ways in which you already work with data.
Maybe you are interested in advanced data analytics or data science. You’re not as far away as you think.
Maybe you aren’t interested in data at all. You may be surprised that, whether you like it, you use data all the time, so you may as well get good at using it.
Go ahead and brag during this exercise. I even made you a beautiful worksheet to do it in!
List accomplishments that you are particularly proud of in the first column. In the second, relate how this accomplishment involved data. You may surprise yourself with how much value you’ve already derived from data!
Congratulations on completing this exercise and seeing your data accomplishments. I bet these were difficult tasks that brought you a sense of accomplishment. After all, if data is the new oil, it takes work to refine it. You’ve done more than you think with data, whether you like it or not. So you may as well keep going!
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