Data Detritus

Data Detritus is the term, we don’t hear every day 😊.

Let’s decode it…..

As we discussed in topic i.e., Dark Data, that it is utmost important for a CDO (Chief Data Officer) to minimize Dark Data as much as possible, in the organization. In other words, the more the Dark Data, the more cost without any ROI. Time is not far when Dark Data Management will become the most essential and obvious KPI for CDO (Chief Data Officer).

Now the questions are.

·        Is all Dark Data bad? NO.

·        Is all Dark Data delete or purge able? Yes and No.

‘Data Detritus means that data, which is no more required, data which is of no use anymore etc.’

·        Dark data is something which was and is, not in-use

·        Dormant data is something which is hardly, in-use

·        Detritus data is something which was in-use but will not be in-use, anymore

In other words, Detritus data was once valuable before it became Dormant, as compared to traditional Dark Data (explained separately) which was never in-use due to technologies barriers etc. Detritus data is normally not deleted or purged as it can still be required for Regulatory or Compliance parties.

A perfect example of a Data Detritus can be, in banking sector, first transaction by a customer who is still active with bank since last 20 years. Bank don’t need this information for any kind of analytics or decision making but it can’t delete or purge this transaction as anytime Regulatory body can ask when this customer came onboard, from which location he/ she did his/ her first transaction? We won’t go into reason of this query but there can be queries like this.

Specially, in this era of social media where data size is huge, as per some estimation Twitter itself only, process 52 Terabyte of data daily so do we need to keep all that data forever, actually No. We can convert all those data element which were used for decision making, as Dark data and rest must be deleted or purged.

In nutshell, the data which was in-use in past is most probably keep in cold storage and rest can be deleted or purged.

E-commerce is the business model which delete or purge most of its data after extracting valuable insights from it.

Cheers.