Darth Data

While I was grocery shopping today, I couldn’t resist taking this picture of Darth Tater.

While I was grocery shopping today, I couldn’t resist taking this picture of Darth Tater.

As the Amazon product review explains: “Be it a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away or right here at home in the 21st century, Mr. Potato Head never fails to reinvent himself.”

I couldn’t help but think of how although data’s quality is determined by evaluating its fitness for the purpose of business use, most data has multiple business uses, and data of sufficient quality for one use may not be for other, perhaps unintended, business uses.

It is this “Reinventing data for mix and match business fun!” that often provides the context for what, in hindsight, appear to be obvious data quality issues.

It makes me wonder if it’s possible to turn high quality data to the dark side of the Force by misusing it for a business purpose for which it has no applicability, resulting in bad, albeit data-driven, business decisions.

Please post a comment and let me know if you think it is possible to turn Data-kin Quality-walker into Darth Data.

May the Data Quality be with you, always.