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Showing posts with the label data is data

What occurs when physical beings transition to information beings?

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You are standing in front of Deep Thought , as in the AI in HitchHicker Guide to the Galaxy.  You are tasked with asking the famous question.  “What is the answer to the world, the universe and everything?”  In Douglas Adams original work, Deep Thought responds by saying, “it will take some time”; before coming back sometime later with the answer “42.”  However, this is when data was a statistic, and we were “physical beings” who had not considered what experience would emerge as data became dynamic and we transitioned to “information beings.” In our new context as informational beings, Deep Thought would not just take our question, go off to think about it but would respond.  Deep Thought would do what we do and ask for clarification and to check the understanding of the question. I can imagine Deep Thought asking, “I just wanta check what you mean by ‘the answer to the world the universe and everything’ and do you want a brave answer, comfortable, or courageous answer?  I can do a

Why framing “data” as an asset or liability is dangerous

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If there is one thing that can change finance’s power and dominance as a decision-making tool, it is the rest of the data . According to Google (2020), 3% of company data is finance data when considered part of an entire company’s data lake. McKinsey reports that 90% of company decisions are based on finance data alone, the same 3% of data.   If you are in accounting, audit or finance shoes, how would you play the game to retain control when something more powerful comes on the scene?  You ensure that data is within your domain, you bring out the big guns and declare that data is just another asset or liability, and its rightful position is on the balance sheet.  We get to value it as part of the business. If we reflect on it, finance has been shoring up its position for a while.  HR, tech, processes, methods, branding, IP, legal, and culture have become subservient and controlled by finance. In the finance control game, we are all just an asset or liability and set a budget!  In the

Humans want principles, society demands rules and businesses want to manage risk, can we reconcile the differences?

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The linkage between principles and rules is not clear because we have created so many words and variances in language that there is significant confusion. We are often confused about what we mean as we are very inconsistent in how we apply words and language, often to provide a benefit to ourselves or justify our belief. To unpack the relationships we need to look at definitions, but we have to accept that even definitions are inconsistent. Our conformational bias is going to fight us, as we want to believe what we already know, rather than expand our thinking. (building on orignal article with Kaliyia) Are we imagining principles or values?   Worth noting our principles are defined by our values. Much like ethics (group beliefs) and morals (personal beliefs) and how in a complex adaptive system my morals affect the group’s ethics and a group’s ethics changes my morals. Situational awareness and experience play a significant part in what you believe right now, and what the group or so

Wisdom is nothing more than new data. Wisdom is definitely not a pinnacle

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When you hear or read the list that ends in Wisdom, starting from data, we are framed into imaging triangle, with wisdom at the top.  Yes, there is undoubtedly less wisdom than there is data, but that does not mean anything more than there will be more data will than wisdom if we consider volume as a metric.  We do love the triangle as a shape. The pinnacle. We love to imagine that wisdom has more value than data, somehow it is more noble and worthy as only a few will get wisdom, and therefore if I obtain it I will be at the top of the tree.   Let’s unpack this thinking. Starting with Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs.  The first thing is that in his 1943 paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" Maslow's present is a theory for motivation. Maslow's hierarchy of needs was suggested as a framework to study how humans intrinsically partake in behavioural motivation.  Interestingly he did not draw a triangle but a square block with each layer as a rectangle. “Hierarchy” was taken