Big Data Now: 2014 Edition

Chapter 7. Building a Data Culture

In an environment where new capacities and tools are introduced almost daily, the limiting challenge in an organization is often harnessing these powers to drive decisions and action. While there are many good ways to structure your data personnel and their relationship to the rest of the organization, mutual understanding of needs (the organization’s) and capacities (the data team’s) are vital. In this chapter, Chris Diehl takes us into the life-and-death decisions that the U.S. military was confronting in the Iraq war; data analysis needed to be reframed, and the structures of intelligence gathering and action on the basis of that intelligence rebuilt, in order to save lives. Few other problems present this kind of urgency, but the questions that any organization needs to ask itself are the same. Mike Loukides then steps back and offers a reminder: not only do you have to ask the right questions, you have to make clear what the questions are and why they are important in order to make data analysis actionable.

Understanding the Now: The Role of Data in Adaptive Organizations

Focusing attention on the present lets organizations pursue existing opportunities as opposed to projected ones

by Chris Diehl of The Data Guild

Slow and Unaware

It was 2005. The war in Iraq was raging. Many of us in the national security R&D community were developing responses to the deadliest threat facing U.S. soldiers: the improvised explosive device (IED). From ...