You often hear the expression, “data is the new gold!” or “data is the new oil!” This is partially true, and data is now undoubtedly exceptionally important, however, data without being effectively visualized in a way that provides the end user with actionable insights is useless.
A perfect example has been the recent and unfortunate downfall of Wejo. A once-projected British Unicorn has eventually turned to dust unnecessarily. This, for the most part, because not enough emphasis, budget, or attention was given to the fact that the end users, especially the Public Sector (who are a good 10 years behind the Private sector), cannot do anything with raw data – no matter how good that data is!
I remember sitting in a NE ITS meeting (New England Intelligent Transportation Systems) in Boston last summer and hearing someone state, “Everyone keeps coming to us with big data, we don’t want that. We want real-time actionable insights!”
Despite the amazing advancements we are making in technology and big data, human nature changes much more slowly. To effectively go to market with big data it must be in a platform that is user-friendly and easy to integrate. From experience, it is often not budget that is the problem, but bandwidth and the labour needed to do the heavy lifting to derive the insights.
