Data Leaders Series
Simo Ahava on Tough Truths in Analytics
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A tough truth. We are all wrong. Like we are. We are all wrong and we are all equally stupid. That's how it is. And if anybody tries to claim that they've solved something for everyone, that they've solved data or they've solved analytics or they've solved trust or they've solved AI, then I would take that with a huge grain of salt. I think we've lost a lot of humility over the way because we harp what the big players are doing. I'm kind of anti big player if you haven't picked it up yet. And I think that we've kind of lost the fact that we are all we all need to shape our own idiosyncratic approaches to data. It's like an empiricist principle. When we work in companies, we can't take the big book of best practices and deploy it. It just doesn't work like that. We can use it for inspiration, but we have to decide what our own practices are. I kind of hope that the current shift towards more maybe it's not a shift, maybe it's something I've imagined, but the shift towards more self-service processes helps us understand that not the things that work for my previous company don't necessarily work for my current company. The things that work for other industry companies don't necessarily work for us. So maybe the age of benchmarking in the sense that everything that we did here works everywhere else, maybe that's hopefully over and companies realize that data and analytics is a process that we have to cultivate ourselves and figure out what makes our companies tick. The opposing force to that theory is that it's still very difficult and complicated to do, and not every company wants to do it. So they play, they play the game. They are happily in the bubble that we are all doing best practices and everything works beautifully when in fact they are working with a very shady version of the truth that just doesn't work for them.