I'm going to be honest it seems like a lot of the "data" obsession that has been all the rage among mid-level managers is really basically just a modern dressed up version of augury, or reading pig entrails to predict the future.
These enterprises spend a large amount of time and effort trying to collect data, often the wrong data, toa address a problem they don't understand and then hope if they do enough "data science" on it then it will magically tell them what to do. All without understanding or reasoning behind it, or any real connection to reality just "the data says X".
This results in ideas like "We did A/B testing and it runs out people stay on the page 38% longer if we use design B". Ignoeing the fact that the reason that happened was that design B involved the exit button randomly dancing around the page.
That is of course limiting ourselves to situations where people are actually trying to use data to get answers when much more often it is "I have already made a decision make the data say it was the right one." Which is a whole other can of worms.
Even the best systems marketed as “AI” nowadays can’t reason, by design.
The whole promise of targeted advertising, as well as all those cyberpunk tropes about all-knowing machines (and corporations and governments running them) is based on the fundamental requirement of machine being capable of logic and reason, not just generating statistically-probable statements. Which simply wasn’t a thing when this Big Data meme started, and still not a thing even today. So best they can do is playing statistics until it indicates the Holy Grail of modern corporate existence - sacred Growth. And, yes, it does work, but without any reason or logic to it, just blindly, like evolution. And thing about evolution is that it ends up with weird solutions, like our own retinas.
I think too many managers had consumed way too much sci-fi. Which is not a bad thing, but one gotta keep understanding fiction is a fiction, until all underlying assumptions are entirely satisfied (and it’s the magic of fiction to bring a possible future by just hand-waving and suspending the disbelief).
And because this grew way too much, there is no stopping it. The idea will support itself, corporations preaching it as hard as they can to survive, as all their valuation is in the promise of Big Data making Big Money.
This is the obvious result of letting people who have zero training or education in how you "do science", do science. Science is a process with many pitfalls and ways to fail by accident, even if you genuinely wanted to do it right. Why do we expect people with zero prior experience to get it right?
Product people don't want to do real science with their "data" anyway, because then they might not get the answer they want!
These enterprises spend a large amount of time and effort trying to collect data, often the wrong data, toa address a problem they don't understand and then hope if they do enough "data science" on it then it will magically tell them what to do. All without understanding or reasoning behind it, or any real connection to reality just "the data says X".
This results in ideas like "We did A/B testing and it runs out people stay on the page 38% longer if we use design B". Ignoeing the fact that the reason that happened was that design B involved the exit button randomly dancing around the page.
That is of course limiting ourselves to situations where people are actually trying to use data to get answers when much more often it is "I have already made a decision make the data say it was the right one." Which is a whole other can of worms.