What use is your data?

If you’ve been reading my posts, you know that I feel data is one of the key ingredients of a successful digital transformation. It’s not just about adding software to your products or putting DevOps in place. It is as much about collecting, analyzing and storing data and using this data to improve a variety of aspects of the business. As, in my experience, every proponent of the use of data has a specific and different interest from others, the interesting question is what these relevant aspects are. Here, I provide an initial taxonomy of the uses of data.

At a top level, we can distinguish between the use of data inside and outside the company. Internal use can often be broken down into the use inside the R&D organization and the use in the rest of the company. Inside the R&D organization, data has traditionally been used for quality assurance of products out in the field. During recent years, at least three purposes have been added to that: analytics, experimentation and artificial intelligence/machine learning/deep learning.

Inside R&D