A BRIEF HISTORY OF DATA

  REPORTING Vs ANALYTICS: The chessboard has 32 pieces and 64 boxes and given the scale of production of chess boards, it can be assumed that there are quite a few people in the world who would know how the pieces move and how chess is played. However, there are only a few people who can really play chess in a manner that is worth watching. We are going to wildly extrapolate the same thing to working with data. Yes, there is an enormous amount of data and there is a sizable population of the workforce across different industries who have the word analyst in their designation. So the question is what really differentiates a report from analysis and what differentiates an analyst from a data cruncher/visualizer. This our experience tells us is a challenge that dogs the analytics industry. The ability to write a piece of SQL code makes you an analyst as much as having a telescope makes you an astronomer. We profusely apologize for the overtly critical and pompous tone of this blog- bu...

 According to etymonline.com the word data traces back to 1640 and is "a fact given or granted,". It is also the word we use so frequently in so many different contexts. In the new age data is "transmittable and storable information by which computer operations are performed". Gigrich.com Now let's look at how that data has evolved over a period of time. Thinkautomation.com has an amazing article outlining the evolution of data. The article is a must-read. It talks about the first data collection event traced back almost 19,000 years ago based on the excavation of a bone that had notches on it. The notches on that bone are probably the earliest form of recording data. Jumping a few 1000 years ahead the article talks about the tabulation of death records maintained by the church (a somber report indeed). The man behind this exercise, John Grant, is considered the founder of demographics, another term we throw around so often. Fast-forwarding a couple of centuries...