Bank of England - Big Data Guru

Where do you work? At my place of work the col thing to do is to walk around and say let's get oodles of data on stuff and then analyse it. This methodology is apparently foolproof and will give us the answers to the known universe.


Of course, a little while ago I would sit in the techie meetings and say things like 'Does it scale?' whenever there was a period of silence. Many of the techies now see me as some sort of wise counsel, in the same way I still see them as a naïve group very able at doing things but truly unable to understand why!


So Big Data is the new thing, the power of computers is unmatched and we will soon all learn it is about the data. O course, in the City, there are a huge amount of quantitative analysts who are very happy with any developments that improve their job prospects.


But data to me as two huge issues, accuracy and interpretation. More bad data is still no better than less bad data, perhaps worse even. Interpretation is key - are sales falling because of a declining market or an inefficient sales force - can data tell us this? What if the data says one thing but it turns out later it was the other?


In the Great Financial Crash, data was telling the CEO's of banks their risk of failure was tiny - then lots of banks went bust, quickly. The data had been interpreted spectacularly wrong.


Anyway, the link is to an article where the Bank of England is going to try to use a wider data set to make decisions. This of course is a waste of time, I can quite happily predict what the Bank is going to do with very limited data - it is going to set rates nice and low to keep the Zombie economy going and allow the Government to create too much debt. It has been doing this for over a decade with no sign of change - how is a bigger data set going to make this a different decision?


Of course it won't and this is some sham PR exercise, as per usual.