Inside The Box, Issue 1.1: The Data Paradox
Welcome to Inside The Box, a series of occasional papers on the most pressing issues facing individuals and enterprises responsible for societal security, safety and health.
Every four weeks we will showcase a particular aspect of risk, describing the challenges that decision-makers confront daily and surveying the tools and techniques that are deployed to assist them.
Digital Sandbox believes that only with the right blend of human and technological ingenuity can organizations achieve the focus and clarity they need to make intelligent decisions in an environment of extraordinary pressure, distraction and information overload.
We pride ourselves on employing the brightest minds in science, mathematics and information science, and unleashing their creative energies on the most vexing problems of the day.
In short, we are inspired by the power of ideas—and by finding the best way to put those ideas into practice. Each monthly issue of Inside the Box is our attempt to shed light on the collaborative thinking that drives us and the decisions we make. We hope the results will be informative, enlightening and thought-provoking.
The Data Paradox
Organizations today have an ocean of data at their disposal – exponentially more and in a wider variety of formats than their leaders could have imagined even a few short years ago.
Thanks to a string of technology breakthroughs, they also have an unprecedented ability to gather, process and visualize that data, and to share the results anywhere on the planet at near light-speed.
Yet senior decision-makers at these organizations are warning that they’ve reached a saturation point, that the size of their data repositories far outstrips their ability to process the stuff. And as each day brings fresh waves of new data, they fall further behind in their struggle to derive meaning from it all. In short, they are now in the paradoxical position of being less able to make informed decisions precisely because they have more data.
Adding to the pressure, expectations are rising among the leaders of commercial and government enterprises for ever greater perfection in data-driven analysis and decisions. The CEO of a hospital system, for example, might see a Google or a Bing mine exactly the right nugget of information from the vast expanse of the Internet and ask: “Why can’t my organization do that?” No longer satisfied to pose simple questions, such as: “Where are our hospitals located and how many beds do we have?”, the CEO has come to expect the technology to behave like an intelligent research partner, capable of answering complex queries like: “How prepared are we for a massive surge of patients due to a pandemic disease outbreak, or a large-scale terrorist attack?”
While the organization’s leaders – not to mention its customers and regulators – clamor for such capabilities, the decision-maker worries that reflexively throwing more data at a problem without also being able to analyze it in a manageable and contextually relevant way would be counterproductive or, worse, a potential source of liability should a larger failure be blamed on the analytical shortcomings.
But what if the decision-maker could approach the problem from a different angle, grasping its most significant aspects up front and using that understanding to craft an analytical framework, before even a single shred of data is examined? What if such a holistic framework allowed that decision-maker to zero in on the very data elements that would be most useful in solving that problem, while filtering out everything else?
Digital Sandbox not only believes this is possible, we have built an entire suite of data analysis tools and services around such an approach.
No magic formula exists that will consistently give every organization the answers it seeks. But after more than a decade of listening to and serving those responsible for making decisions regarding the nation’s most critical risks, we have reached a firm conviction that the right data context – that is, the right selection, organization and presentation of data – can be a very powerful aid in making sound policy and business decisions, and in applying solutions quickly and affordably.
