Will You and Your Data Be Friends in 2017?

Has anyone else noticed what may be a warming trend? No, not global warming, but a warmer reception to data initiatives within the general public and the business community.   It just might be that our acceptance of data as part of our personal and business lives has grown stronger over the past 12 to 18 months. My observations about a stronger embrace of data and analytics are largely anecdotal, and could be blown away by a couple of informative All Analytics articles from the past two weeks. Tricia Aanderud raised some good questions about our love-hate relationship with data after the presidential election in The Election Aftermath: Is Data Dead?. Then Ariella Brown delivered an informative analysis of a KPMG survey on trust in In Data Analytics We Trust? . Yet, we hear about how interest in data-driven shopping aided by digital assistants and tools such as the Amazon Dash button is growing, and plenty of people are high on the autonomous car concept. When my faithful home PC went into digital hospice last week I ordered a replacement. My first task with my new laptop was to uncheck the dozens of default "sharing" options that would have let Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and other vendors collect data from every keystroke, every application, every website visited, and every location where I used the PC. While I wasn't in a sharing mood, I'm sure that a million or more people buying similar machines this year will gladly feed such data to the companies based on the promise of "a better user experience." In business, have we passed the tipping point where the majority of managers increasingly trust, or even demand, data as part of the decision process? Plus, more CEOs are recognizing the value of data by having their chief data officers report directly into the corner office. No marketing or product initiative will move forward without some plan to collect performance metrics. The Internet of Things isn't going away. The All Analytics team is looking at the human-data relationship on Tuesday. Bloggers Lisa Morgan and Pierre DeBois will join me on All Analytics Radio at 2 pm (Eastern) for Will Data and Humans Become Friends in 2017. (If you miss the live broadcast, you can listen on demand using the same link at any time). We will be discussing whether data has expanded into our lives by stealth, as we rely upon and also share data without consciously recognizing the role that analytics and data play in our decisions, our actions, and our entertainment. Do people who actively avoided data a couple of years ago now at least tolerate it, even if they don't embrace it? What role do the millennials -- I know, I heard that we aren't supposed to call them that any more -- play in our changing attitudes toward data? Will there be a backlash against data because of the election and the never-end data breaches?