How the Brains and Nervous Systems of Data Ignite Corporate and Collaborative Cognition
Just as I began to write this essay, eyewear startup Warby Parker effectively made the point of my last post on data’s new “Cambrian age” — The company generated $6.7 billion in its IPO debut.
This success reflects the fact that decade-old Warby Parker is less an eyewear retailer than it is a master of data driving the optometrical universe — like Airbnb leveraging data in lodging, Oscar in health insurance, or Spotify in music.
Those successes should not obscure the fact that most companies remain overwhelmed by data. In fact, among those leading the Fortune 500, 75 percent say they don’t believe their companies are data-driven, two thirds don’t regard data as an asset, and more than half say they are not yet driving innovation with data, according to the consultancy New Vantage Partners.
“When I think about the behavior of many business people today, I imagine a breadline,” wrote Tomasz Tunguz in Winning With Data. “The employees are the data-poor waiting around at the end of the day on the data breadline.”
Hoarding Data
Executives don’t get what they need. Sometimes, they don’t even know what they need. IT departments rush between data silos to the point of exhaustion. A staggering 70 percent of brazil whatsapp number data data engineers say they are likely to quit in the next year, according to an October 2021 study conducted by Wakefield Research and co-sponsored by data.world and DataKitchen. Teams literally brawl over decision-making in the absence of accessible and verifiable data. The pandemic has exacerbated this, siloeing people along with the already-siloed data.
Another view on this comes from the towering thinker on our emerging data-driven civilization, Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired and author of books including The Inevitable. He dubs this inertia the “counter force” that contrasts with much outlying success.
“... right now data tends to be hoarded like gold,” Kelly writes.
I believe what is specifically lacking is cognition — the acquisition of knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses — within and between enterprises.
At the end of the day, what we provide our enterprise customers and community members is simply a new, innovative form of cognition — corporate cognition for our enterprise customers, and collaborative cognition for our 1.4-million-plus community members who use our platform to confront climate change, poverty, COVID-19, and more.