Data as a Feature

Data as a Feature: Turning Data into Your Product’s Most Potent Asset

Overview: Making Sense of Data Overload

We live in a world where people expect answers at their fingertips. They want their bank balances to reflect their financial transactions in real time. They want their smart electrical meters to tell them to the penny how much energy they’ve consumed. So where do they go? To applications! Consumers fire up their banking application on their smartphones or log into their energy company’s website on their laptops. There they find the answers they need.

On the business side, companies want to know how well they’re serving their customers, how many pallets of inventory are left in a warehouse, or what treatment is proving most effective for patients at a hospital.

We’re a long way from the 1970s, when only academics and specialized operational workers—for example, air traffic controllers—understood how to use data correctly (see Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1. Evolution of data people (source: Jaspersoft)

Over the past decade, everybody from nontechnical business leaders to casual consumer technology users have discovered ways in which they can use data to improve their work and their lives. As might be expected, as soon as this change was underway, people began demanding access to ever more data. And until fairly recently, “too much data” was never a concern.

Fast-forward to today. ...