Welcome – I think this is going to be a shadow blog for a while until everything is in place.

I note that in today’s (London) Times Stephan Shakespeare purports to quote Sir Terry Leahy as saying:

An enterprise without data is like a car with no headlights at night.

Actually, I couldn’t find it on the web, not even with Google. I wonder if Mr Shakespeare has misremembered this famous quote.

In any event, I never encountered an enterprise without data. The problem faced by most enterprises is turning that data into information and exploiting it in making business decisions. I fear that all those decisions are made under besetting uncertainties that have little in common with a halogen beam into the future.

Data, no matter how Big, is not enough. It will not help you steer the car unless you know how to add value to it. In doing that, awareness of uncertainty and variation is a key insight.