Data buzzwords & where to find them

If there’s one thing you can trust data people with, is to come up with more and more buzzwords, enough to fill in the agenda of at least 3 conventions. This inflation might be confusing, but don't worry. I’m here to help. Since all buzzwords borned equal, they’re arranged in alphabetical order.

Data Catalog

Yet another fact table, that is connected to dim_table, dim_business_reason and dim_data_owner.?

Data Democratization

I’ve already wrote about this one, but you can’t write an article about data buzzwords without referring to it. Data Democratization is the perception that every person should have access to the data regardless of their role in the company. When the fine people that supported this term realized that just like in some democracies “access to all” means giving too much power to the wrong people, they’ve pivoted to claim that actually it means that data should be available to people regardless of their data skills. So basically it’s Data Literacy, yet another buzzword.?

Data Fabric

One must give it to Gartner . They came up with the Fabric ages ago, but had to put it aside for a while to pay their respects to the new kid in town - the Mesh. So they've waited. Soon enough it was clear that Data Mesh is a great book, one of the best I’ve read in this area. That’s it. Now the entire world of data is back talking about the Fabric, a data management design that is focusing on governance and data quality.?

Data Trash

Data Trash rhymes with Data…? Bingo. And yet this brilliant reference of a term was probably created by a Generative AI model, as the order of words is actually upside down. What Data Trash means is trash data, data that you didn’t need to begin with, don’t need now, will never need in the future, and yet it feeds 85% of your high level KPIs dashboards.

Decision Intelligence

Better wording for data driven decision making, with the nice touch of using “intelligence” in a sentence.?

Generative AI

Using AI to generate stuff. Sadly, “stuff” means pictures, articles, music and such, and not for example a cure to cancer or software that does the dishes.?

Large Language Models (LLMs)

Machine Learning models that were trained on huge chunks of written data in order to be able to understand something in natural language and produce an answer accordingly. Could be useful though sometimes misbehaves, interprets the prompt with a biased and non inclusive way of thinking, and generates sentences in the grammatical level of a teenager. So basically a politician.?

Mobile Analytics

No, it’s not the ability to generate insights from mobile data, that’s so 2018. Mobile Analytics is nothing but apps that let you view your data on a mobile device. I can’t believe it’s 2023 and we consider this as a trend. Personally I’ll be impressed when I’ll have ThoughtSpot on Nintendo Switch.?

Predictive Analytics

Everything data scientists do in their day-to-day life, excluding hiding in the basement playing Hogwarts Legacy.?

Self-Service BI

Term that refers to BI dashboards and/or tools that enable stakeholders to easily query the data. That, out of the optimistic belief that this time they’ll actually use the data tools they've asked the data people to build.?

X Analytics

What happens when you have analysts that are being jealous of data scientists having cool models and data engineers winning it with governance? X Analytics is the answer. An analysis that can be run on anything, hence the X. It usually involves blending data from different sources and types, structured at source or not. Once we were used to call it LEFT JOIN, but that’s not as cool as X.?