Data Insight Quotes

Most of 'big data' is a fraud because it is really 'dumb data.'

Making more sense out of my data, my needs, my tasks - to me, that's the future of Office.

Data can set you free.

The best moments are when, together with... you bring information, you bring data to bear in a way that helps illuminate something that you just don't really understand. Even if it doesn't completely clarify it, it just, you know, helps bring it together.

Modern statisticians are familiar with the notion that any finite body of data contains only a limited amount of information on any point under examination; that this limit is set by the nature of the data themselves, and cannot be increased by any amount of ingenuity expended in their statistical examination: that the statistician's task, in fact, is limited to the extraction of the whole of the available information on any particular issue.

Let the dataset change your mindset

The best thing about being a statistician is that you get to play in everyone's backyard.

The problem with data is that it says a lot, but it also says nothing. 'Big data' is terrific, but it's usually thin. To understand why something is happening, we have to engage in both forensics and guess work.

There's a lot of power in executing data - generating data and executing data.

There's been the emergence of a philosophy that big data is all you need. We would suggest that, actually, numbers don't speak for themselves.

Data isn't information, any more than fifty tons of cement is a skyscraper.

Analytics is not about sitting behind a computer and pushing enter and having it produce an answer.

The most valuable thing you can have as a leader is clear data.

In disciplines as disparate as baseball, financial services, trucking and retail, people are realizing the power of data to help make better decisions.

While data can only tell you what has happened in the past, it can in some ways give you a sense of what might be of interest to an audience in the future.

If you consider any set of data without a preconceived viewpoint, then a viewpoint will emerge from the data.

As a consultant at McKinsey, I learned the value of data and the ability to shape that information into an answer.

When you have mastered numbers, you will in fact no longer be reading numbers, any more than you read words when reading books You will be reading meanings.

The very best [infographics] engender and facilitate an insight by visual means - allow us to grasp some relationship quickly and easily that otherwise would take many pages and illustrations and tables to convey. Insight seems to happen most often when data sets are crossed in the design of the piece - when we can quickly see the effects on something over time, for example, or view how factors like income, race, geography, or diet might affect other data. When that happens, there's an instant "Aha!".

The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.

Data is what distinguishes the dilettante from the artist.

You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.

I'm a numbers guy, and I think numbers sometimes tell stories and sometimes they don't. When you look at the NBA, when teams shoot 45% or better from the floor, what is their record? And if they shoot under that what is their record?

The value of having numbers - data - is that they aren't subject to someone else's interpretation. They are just the numbers. You can decide what they mean for you.

The core advantage of data is that it tells you something about the world that you didn't know before.