Getting Angry About Data

We are surrounded by people announcing their passion for things that, on face value, ought not to excite much in the way of passion. I meet interesting folk who announce that they are passionate about innovation, user experience, marketing etc. I even met an earnest gentleman who insisted that he was passionate about financial control.

So why is that I get very strange looks when I tell people that I am passionate about data cohesion? I become animated and demonstrate what chaos would ensue if we were unable to link chunks of data together – bank account numbers with a customer number, motor oil specifications with car models, for example. Still no light bulb moment. It as if everyone believes that the sometimes complex relationships and hierarchies necessary to link real world entities together are just a given, that they simply reflect in-itself nature of these entities.

In vain do I try to explain the complexities of associating orders with customers and billing accounts as, for my listener, these associations are not things that we must toil to impose on a chaotic miasma of events, they are, rather, intrinsic to them. Obviously, an order is placed on behalf of a customer and obviously it will be billed via some account. What is the big deal?

And then it dawned on me. These people are largely right. It is our failure of discipline that has given rise to the complexities that force us to work so hard to link together data to provide a useful view of the world. A little more foresight, a little less focus on our internal organisations/systems and little more concern with how things are from a user or customer perspective and no-one would need to be passionate about data. Rather than passionate, we should be angry when our data structures do not correspond to the world that we want to explore.