Dan DeLuca Hw 5

The article that I read was called “How Big Data Is Changing The Way We Lead”, which was written by Dan Woods on February 1st, 2012. The article was about how data is effecting the way organizations were now running their businesses. The article described how big data allows for clarity in a company which allows for faster and easy decision making. Also in the article the author describes how data adds clarity to decisions; “Data adds clarity, and clarity of vision in big decisions is the cornerstone of success. Data really parts the clouds from the vision, if you will”. Also in the article the author discusses Finally at the end of the article the author describes how much data we have, and the importance of it for it to be helpful to us; “We live in a time where we empirically know so much more about everything that happens around us than we have ever known in the entire history of the world,” I thought that this article was very interesting especially that it does affect our daily lives. I feel that every day we in our own lives use data to determine feature events. For example, if you look at the college’s retention rate you could input the data of previous years to potentially estimate how many students we would lose for the upcoming year. However one thing that we need to know about data is that it’s not always the most reliable source. For instance if we were to use the wrong data or use data that didn’t have to do with the topic like for example retention we may get numbers that would have nothing to do with the actual numbers. I do however think that although there may be some problems in regards to data if used importantly can be very valuable. There are a lot of companies that rely on data; “When you build a whole business around that, it is tremendously powerful. I think that’s behind the fascination about data-intensive businesses like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn. They are truly building a value system around data”. I believe that when used right data can be extremely important.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danwoods/2012/02/01/how-big-data-is-changing-the-way-we-lead/