“Data, data everywhere” is the title of a survey in the Feb 25 issue of The Economist. The survey starts with the subhead “Information has gone from scarce to superabundant. That brings huge new benefits […] but also big headaches.”
I love it; Sigma loves it. These benefits and headaches drive innovation in the startup world which play to our strengths. Several of the Sigma team, myself included, have deep technical, sales or operating backgrounds working with database and data management technologies. The trends described wonderfully in The Economist’s survey are fuelling a surge in related startups, and we are seeing many of them as they seek funding. We even invest in a few of them.
This surge in data, in data management and analysis tools is changing our lives. Mostly this is in mundane ways, but we still live at the start of the era where all this data is available to us wherever we are … anyone who has done a Google search from their phone over a dinner table conversation (and has thought wryly to themselves “my how things have changed”) is a beneficiary. The dangers and headaches are also the subject of good writing in The Economist and elsewhere, but there is no stopping this tide.
Mastery of statistics, data analysis, data visualization and knowledge distillation are skills that already underpin large parts of our economy. This will only increase. If you are not familiar with these trends, go back to the top, click on that Economist link, and enjoy the read. (Oh, I’ll make it easy … here it is again).
