My whole career I've heard about this magical oil of the future that will give its hoarders the world on a silver platter. Give it a problem and data will solve it.<p>Data, the solution to everything? I'm not talking about data that is collected for science. I'm talking about the hoarding of usage data of your app or your CRM systems or consumption data.<p>Anytime I hear a data scientist talk, there is a disconnect between the model and assumptions they use as foundation of their analysis or the real world. They use the data they can find, to ask questions they think they might be able to answer.<p>On the other side you have Marketing collecting massive amounts, to try to sell a bit more or get a little bit longer watch time on their platform. Often without even _really_ understanding what they are doing except spending money on ads.<p>Am I naive to think that only perhaps 2% of the companies using data that way are able to get real use out of it?<p>I'm just curious, how successful have you been or seen the usage of that collected data? After weeding out the buzzwords, wishful thinking, skewed incentives, cargo-culting and other nonsense?<p>How did your company manage to pierce trough all that? What resources are out there that deal with these kind of issues? I just see all the complexity in the world and all models are wrong but some are helpful. How can slice the helpful part out of the complex system that is called the world?