“I have no data yet… It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data,” said Arthur Conan Doyle’s world-famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, in the story A Scandal in Bohemia.
Published in 1892, Holmes was a data-driven detective, pulling together observations and facts until the motive for a crime was ‘elementary my dear Watson’.
Close to 130 years after Holmes uttered these words, organisations, amazingly, are still trying to puzzle their way out of business challenges without the right data. More amazing still is that these organisations have the data but, without proper data engineering, are unable to access it to discover the insights that could revolutionise their organisations.