Thinking Swedish about your data

You may be expecting a tortured metaphor about flat pack furniture, or perhaps a comparison with a certain car maker that takes safety very seriously. No. Nothing like that.

Stockholm archipelago

Well, yes. Something absolutely like that (and we may cover those other topics another time!). However, this time we’re going to be discussing why having “just the right amount” of data is perfect.

Just enough

The Swedes have a word - Lagom - which means “just the right amount”. They use it to indicate that they’ve eaten enough, that they’re well or one of many other feelings or situations. In fact, their whole society is a lesson in Lagom. Everyone is well looked after, no one should be too rich or too poor, balance is key.

Data can be just like this.

The trend of “Big Data” has been with us for a while now. The aim for many businesses was (and still is in some cases) to grab as much data as they could and apply analytics to all of it in the hope of finding the nugget of gold (data mining in its purest sense). However, this can become costly in terms of storage and compute, not to mention the simple fact that some data will be irrelevant to the actual questions you’re trying to answer.

On the flip side, there is the privacy-led approach of “data minimisation” - reducing the amount of data you hold to just that which is strictly necessary for the task at hand. When you’re dealing with personal data, this is absolutely the right approach to preserve privacy and trust. However, there is a risk that you could miss out on that critical insight that leads your business to the next big thing.

With changing attitudes to privacy and regulation there is also a very real risk that businesses who were previously reliant on 3rd party data may find themselves with not enough insight on their customers.

So let’s be Lagom with our data. Not too much and not too little, but just enough. Be happy with that.

Becoming Lagom with your data

The big step your business will need to take is to understand what data you do and don’t need. What represents “enough”?

Understanding what data you have today that’s important to running your business is key. It’s also useful to place some form of comparable value on it (£, $ or S, M, L - it doesn’t matter). Beyond that critical list of assets, what can be decommissioned or what are you missing?

How good (or not) is that important data and how could you improve it? How costly would it be to collect the data that you are missing from your critical list? How can removing a bunch of unnecessary data allow you to maximise your focus on the data that truly matters?

This audit begins to identify areas of overlap from your business strategy to your data strategy. How can getting serious about data truly enable the business?

Ultimately, what data is the right data and how much (or little) do you need? This is why thinking about data like a Swede is so useful.

Archernar can help you in a number of ways such as a data purpose audit, data strategy support or perhaps just a nice coffee, cinnamon bun and a chat to point you in the right direction.

You bring the data problems, we’ll bring the buns.