"Missing signs and potholes" - Section 5 of 7: THE DATA LITERACY DRIVING SCHOOL (free excerpts)

This is the fifth part of the chapter titled “The Data Literacy Driving School”, from the book “The Data Garden And Other Data Allegories”.

______________________________

Missing signs and potholes

Your next set of lessons is about dangers on the road and how to avoid them.

The first one surprises you: it’s about road signs. As you’re driving down a road that your instructor has taken you several times before, he asks you to look up and see if there’s anything that you can see that’s missing. You shake your head: it all looks the same as it’s always looked, to you.

“OK,” the instructor responds, “so if you’d never been down this road before, how would you know where you are?”

Then it hits you. There are no road signs, at all. Nothing to say what road you’re on, what the speed limit is, or anything. Then you notice there aren’t even any road markings. You’re astounded that you’ve never noticed it before.

The instructor chuckles at your reaction. “Never go down a data road without any metadata signs up, unless you’re with someone that really knows the area, because otherwise you’re going to get yourself lost. Transaction Data City is full of roads like this. The builders just didn’t bother putting any signs up, because they thought people would just know where they’re going. I guess, when this was just a small town, it didn’t matter so much, but now there are big areas where data people can get complete lost. I’ve heard about data people going missing for days, as they go round and round in circles and then end up re-appearing where they went in, no closer to their destination but very tired and frustrated from their rather unproductive adventure.”

“Why don’t the government put up new signs, if it’s such a problem?”

“Oh, yes, well there is a huge Meta-project to do just that, but once the builders have gone, it’s ten times harder to work out what each road should be called and where it leads. That’s why the project’s costing so much and taking so much time: each road needs to be properly surveyed and experts need to be built in to make sure the signs are right. There were past attempts to do this on the cheap, but it resulted in the wrong metadata signs being put up and people ended up going completely the wrong way: it was even worse than having no signs at all!”

You shake your head. Surely it’s obvious that signs should be put up when the road’s built; but then, it can’t be that obvious, if there are so many roads like this.

Your instructor asks you to go down a side road, to show you another common challenge. You find out what it is straight away: there’s a violent BANG as one of your wheels bounces over a pothole. You gasp and clamber to regain control. 

“Careful,” your instructor advises, “you need to go slower down this road. There are lots of holes, where big chunks of the road are missing. It’s dangerous and can result in damage to your data car.”

“This is crazy,” you exclaim. “How’s anyone expected to drive down a road that has so many problems?”

“Well, there are some roads that you can’t drive down at all, as it turns out. They’re in such a bad state, they’re totally unusable. And yet, that doesn’t stop people trying to use them. It’s surprising, really, when it’s quite easy to see how poor the quality of the data road is, why people think they can still use it. Park at the side of the road over there for a moment, please.”

You do as you’re told and turn to hear what your instructor has to say next.

______________________________


I hope you’ve enjoyed this excerpt. 

If you are interested in reading more, please do check the book out on Amazon:

  • The Data Garden on Amazon.CO.UK
  • The Data Garden on Amazon.COM

    • Thanks for reading!

    #data #datamanagement #datagovernance #dataquality #dataarchitecture #metadata #dataliteracy #allegories #metaphors #analogies #stories #storytelling 


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