It's Not the Data that's Important, It's the Story

Mark Mullaly is president of Interthink Consulting Incorporated, an organizational development and change firm specializing in the creation of effective organizational project management solutions. Since 1990, it has worked with companies throughout North America to develop, enhance and implement effective project management tools, processes, structures and capabilities. Mark was most recently co-lead investigator of the Value of Project Management research project sponsored by PMI. You can read more of his writing at markmullaly.com.

  Business Intelligence   Strategy  

To hear the media tell it (online or otherwise), we live in an age of big data. There is no problem so complex and no question so difficult that data cannot theoretically solve it. Certainly, there is a great deal of data out there, and we are generating more at an exponential rate. According to IDC, we had created 2.8 zettabytes (let's accept that is a number as large as it sounds) of data in the entire history of the world by 2012. This is expected to double again by 2015.

Whole new industries and professions exist now that didn't a few years ago. We have organizations positioning themselves as data wholesalers, data aggregators, data miners and data curators (seriously…I did not make that last one up). Professionally, we have data analysts, data scientists, business intelligence professionals, data gurus and data wizards (still not making it up). Of course, we used to just call them statisticians.

Without question, what it's now possible to do with data is becoming truly impressive. We marvel at the recommendations that Amazon offers up as we add a book to our shopping cart, often quickly adding several more (at least, I do, but I don't think I'm alone in this). We appreciate that Netflix offers us up additional recommendations based upon our viewing habits. But big data has gone far beyond that. A recent study, for example, found that …

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