My name is Malcolm Chisolm and since the 1980’s I have been involved in data. At first I was a developer, but then I moved to database design, and ultimately to strategic data management. I have seen data transform from being almost irrelevant to one of the most important resources in the economy.
The part of my career when I was a developer was a great experience. Developers get the freedom to design and create. Obviously, there are economic constraints, and specific goals that developers need to meet, but building something that then works, and which other people rely on is very satisfying. What I also found is that there are methodologies in programming, so it truly is its own specialization, and not just an extension of logic or mathematics, which some people think it is.
My programming was always acting on data. Initially, I only thought much about the data to the extent needed to make sure my programming worked. There were a few basic data management practices like backups and restores that I had to do, but not much more. Then I discovered databases and began to design them. Again, specific methodologies came into play, and I realized that data was its own thing.
There was an opportunity to be creative with data, by designing databases, but gradually I began to realize that data is fundamentally different to other things that matter to us. We live in the Information Age, but we still think and act as if we are in the Industrial Age. As a result, we have many difficulties in interacting with and managing data - because it is not like any industrial good.
This realization spurred me to get much more involved with data and its problems. I began to write articles about it, speak at conferences, and have now published five books on the subject. It is not as if things are getting any easier. New waves of technology, and innovative uses of data bring questions, needs, and problems for data that were not there before. There is a constant need to deal with this ever-evolving field of human endeavor that is data.
Until a new Adam Smith comes along and explains it all to us, we are going to have to do the best we can and take incremental steps. That is what this Substack is intended to do. I aim to provide a grounding in data for everyone, not just those with a technical interest.
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