What is Dataship?

I recently decided to pursue new challenges in my career and I accepted the role of IT Director and Digital Transformation in Kimberly-Clark Brazil. I recently completed my first 100 days in K-C. There is so much buzz about the first 100 days, it is known to be a period of uncertainty, anxiety and fear. In the other hand, there is excitement of knowing new places, new people, new products, everything new. It is certainly a time where you get overloaded by information causing a phenomenon called infoxication. I started thinking about this, how I could deal with the incredible volume of new data I was getting. And this inspired me to share a bit of this particular view with you and invite you to the dialog.

So, this article is not about technology, also not about business, neither about education. Maybe it is about all of them together. I read and listen many different sources about how digital technology and behavior has been changing the world, the famous digital transformation. By the way, I don’t like this terminology at all. When you are transforming something, it is assumed that you are going from a state A to a state B, you transform A into B. If this was our challenge, I think our lifes as IT executives would be much easier. The thing is: what is A? what is B? It seems that no one knows. It seems we’re trying to define A and have a rough idea of how B could look like. So, isn’t it more an evolution rather than a transformation?

But let’s go back to the original point. Data. I won’t start by saying that the humanity produced more data yesterday that it produced during its whole story. Neither I will say that by 2020 there will be millions of billions of PetaHexaTera bytes of data in the world. We all know and are tired of that, right?

The point here is how do we navigate at this sea, how do we read the correct signals, how to differentiate what is relevant data and last, and absolutely not least, how do we take decisions with these data?

Simple, I’d like to propose a new word to the dictionary.

Dataship - da· ta· ship

           1 - ability to think, read, process, delete, learn and decide using data

           2 - state of being addicted to data and its consequences

           ‘this year I need to develop my dataship’

           ‘I appreciate Richard’s dataship’  

At this moment, you should be thinking what does your dataship looks like. Am I right?

But Dataship is not only related to individuals. Why can’t we measure the dataship of an organization? How would you evaluate the dataship of KC – a 150 years old lady?

I can think about some attributes that one needs to have in order to develop this so called dataship.

-      Data literacy: this would be developed during our hard years in school. Just as we learn how to read and how to calculate, we would know what a relational database is, 1st-2nd-3rd normal form, Fibonacci series, sorting algorithms, etc. I will stop here to not become too geek. Data literacy will enable us to manipulate data effectively. Volume, velocity and variety of data will require data literacy. Thanks God that data storage cost has dramatically reduced over time. Storage of 1 GB in AWS costs about 4 cents of dollar. Every chef needs to learn how to manipulate ingredients before mixing them. At this stage, data is just raw material as an egg for omelets.

-      Data torture: this is more sophisticated. This is how we extract value from data. Have you heard about R programming language? There is a bunch of tools (not necessarily technology) in the toolbox of a data scientist. Algorithms are one of those. Algorithms are simply a structured and repeatable emulation of how the human brain processes data and provides a result. An algorithm will always provide the same output given a certain input. Nowadays it is possible to find vast repository of algorithms available in the internet for much more problems than you can even imagine. And most of them for free. As all the species evolve, algorithms did too. Artificial intelligence and its variations (machine learning, deep learning, cognitive computing, etc) is the answer for this. Based upon data, machines can learn and provide different answers to variations of the original problem solved. It is not human vs. machine. It is human + machine. Taking our metaphor back, the chef now has the pasta dough.

-      Obsessively Data-Driven: once you are comfortable with the previous two attributes, you need to develop your ability of wearing the data lenses. This is probably the most difficult skill to develop. Imagine if all executives had to justify their decisions with data. Exactly, this is being data-driven. But not limited to. Imagine if dataship was part of the standards of leadership of an organization. Imagine if data could be treated as an asset and had to be declared in the balance worksheets of the organization. What if we could pay products and goods with data? Would it help to develop our dataship? There is no doubt that we are open to provide our data as we see a real benefit in exchange. Imagine if we had a data account, similar to our bank account. Store and protect your data just as you do with your money. All the examples above show how our mindset should be focused on data and what it produces. To conclude our trip to the kitchen, the chef now decides what dish will be served and the wine that will best harmonize to delight the customer.

Off course we’re in the middle of the journey. Some things mentioned above may sound too futuristic and some others are already a common sense in our lives. The important is to understand the move, in which way the wind is blowing. Stay tuned in the data privacy discussions, as GDPR seems to be the new driving code of conduct. Reward who is giving you good experiences and services based upon your data, believe me, there are few. Do you use Waze? And punish the ones who are not doing a good job. Have you ever been chased by that banner of that destination you searched for your last summer vacations?  

And finally, enjoy the ride. Don’t be afraid. Data will make us feel uncomfortable and unsafe for some moment, but it will definitely make the world a better place to live.