Cargo cult data science

Post by riri-au » Thu, Aug 03, 2017, 10:48 PM UTC

Will_Parker wrote: post #33

This article seems to speak unfavourably towards building a basic BI infrastructure. I don't know why. There is immense value for having a single trusted source of truth where the most basic business questions can be answered ad hoc, with a suite of simple visualizations and KPIs that cover the most important facts of how the business is doing. Data like this serves as a crucial element of communication across differ…

I guess I was a bit harsh, fair call.

I'll respond this way: basic BI infrastructure is the bedrock of an organization's data capabilities. The best way for an organization to build their initial BI/DS capability is to address some business problem, by building a warehouse. That's in contrast to building a warehouse and then looking for problems to solve with it.

So you're right, thanks for taking time to comment :)

Post by Bartweiss » Fri, Aug 04, 2017, 3:19 PM UTC

riri-au wrote: post #39

Bartweiss wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An organization which _always_ values data-driven decision making over expertise-driven decision making is always going to fall prey to this myopia. This is a huge and under-appreciated concern. It's disturbing how often success is measured by optimizing a single metric, and how resistant people can be to recognizing issues with this approach. A goal like "improve clickthrough rates" is easy to measure, but without…

You preempted my followup article. I'm not sure where the balance between these two is, but I'm sure that many places get it wrong.

I'm definitely excited for that followup, then. I think this is an incredibly common issue in both directions, and a surprising number of companies seem to make both errors at once.

Re: Cargo cult data science

Re: Cargo cult data science