One of my favorite board games to play is battleship. For those of you who do not know what this game is, I will explain. In this game, you are playing against an opponent where you set up plastic ships on a X and Y-Axis format board; the Y-Axis is letters and the X-Axis is numbers. You and opponent take turn trying to guess where your opponent has set up his ships on his board. Some ships are considered “sunk” after being guessed(hit) two times, but there are ships that can take up to five consecutive guesses to sink the ship.
I was very competitive at this game growing up, and when I would finish the game, I would always draw my opponents board in my battleship notebook. I did this without my friends knowing it. We would take a break, or put the game away, but I made sure I did not put away my section of the board. Before I got together with my friends to play again, I would study my notebook and look for patterns my friends had used in the past, and then I would develop a strategy to win the game.
My strategy for battleship led me to love the game of baseball, which is the most data driven sport that I can think of. Everything is calculated in baseball, even the amount of time an professional athlete visits a mature dating site. For me, I pitched in college. If I was not pitching, I was gathering data against opposing hitters for our pitching staff to use the next time we faced that team again. We used this data to develop a pitching strategy to get their batters out.
Are you getting the picture as to why data is so important? Data drives decisions! Data drives business strategy. Data is so important that companies pay millions of dollars to collect and understand it. For this reason, data analysts are some of the most stable positions in a company. Data analysts are needed to help executives make million dollar decisions!
I hope this post gives you another reason mastering data management is so important to a business future. Data if understood correctly can make or break a companies future.