2040's Ideas and Innovations Newsletter, Issue 49: Why Is Good Data Vital Currency and Bad Data a Disaster?

We often talk about the common problem of collecting massive amounts of data without a strategy to transform it into intelligent action-oriented insights. We are all drowning in data as technology and digital interactions have allowed us to collect and store more data and offer access to it. Given the large amounts of data now at our fingertips, we need data scientists and analytical engineers to make sense of it all. We flatter ourselves with the amount of data collected as seemingly size matters and assume the data we have collected is reliable, valuable and meaningful. As we discussed last week, there is also some confusion as to what an output versus an outcome is, and data only adds to the confusion and challenge.

There is a more insidious reality in data management. We don’t identify and assess the right input that assesses outcome measurement. We also make faulty assumptions of incomplete or bad data, we assign the wrong definition and meaning to the data, and we don’t often que…