I was working on a proposal for a significant firm to look at employing some pretty hefty business analytics. I was (naturally) laying out a project plan, and noticed I was spending a lot of time in a risk mitigation phase of determining the underlying quality of the data sources.

The roadmap we ended up with looked a lot like that for an old-world exploratory expedition (see below). This was the only way I could ensure, with reasonable confidence, the quality of the potential outcomes for the project. It involved identifying the desired goal (Gulf of Carpentaria), the potential routes and risks (Dry land up the middle, with not much water), and most importantly, the current status.

It occurred to me that the quickest, quickest way to get lost on a (data) mining expedition, was to not know where you were initially. That is, to get lost it’s best to start lost. Given you are going to be traversing uncharted territory in most mining applications, it suddenly becomes really important to make sure you start out from where you thought you were starting out from. Otherwise you can get a very expensive, random walk out into the aether, because all the assumptions behind your planned route map will be nonsense.

It also highlighted for me how crucial it is to treat the technology with great care. To continue the analogy, if you start of your GPS way point path at the wrong spot, the little handheld unit will be dead certain you are at the Sydney Harbour Bridge, oblivious to the large rock and red dust in front of you. Just so, a poorly fired analytic will tell you with absolute confidence that you should change the Call Centre settings….but if the initial data source wasn’t what you thought it was, you might find yourself standing in a wind blown desert wondering what went wrong.