[devjab]

In my experience data often becomes the “decision argumentation” role which used to be filled by external consultants from E&Y and similar. Which is both good and bad, because data shows the past and that doesn’t necessarily predict the future.

Data can be very helpful though. We pull data from the public company records which show earnings to find possible investors. Then we combine that data with our sales data from HubSpot and Microsoft CRM (don’t ask me why we have both) as well as our internal sales systems. Which provides good data points for our sales department when deciding which potential investors to focus on, and shows them how much they’ve already “bothered” people. 10 years ago all of this was basically done by hand, now it’s mostly automated. Which sucks for the data researchers, but since the majority of those used to be unpaid students who now get to actually work on something more related to their studies, it’s mostly a win-win.

Where data doesn’t really help us is in marketing. Exactly because it’s showing us the past, and while that can be useful, it often hasn’t been very helpful in deciding how to do future campaigns. I imagine a lot of this is also true in other fields which produce content for human consumption. I guess in some areas it will be, but on most “creative” fields the data won’t necessarily show you what people will find “fun” or “interesting”. I think Hollywood, big gaming companies as mentioned in this article and others are sort of struggling with this. Thar is just my guess though as I only have experience with how our marketing department has come to the conclusion that while data is a good measurement of the success of various initiatives it’s not very useful in helping decide what sort of campaign to run next outside of which channels are the best focus, and even then, that also changes over time.