The data is not a toy.

A few years ago my mother-in-law presented me with a replica Rowdy Roddy Piper action figure as a holiday gift.?This was awesome on too many levels to discuss in detail here, but one aspect I will briefly highlight is how Roddy enlightens the power of semi-structured data.?If after reading these musings you would like to learn more, go ahead and register for CAS RPM already so you can check out the awesome session I’m co-presenting - as well as the many other gems CAS has characteristically pulled together.

As fate would have it I had a Rowdy Roddy Piper action figure many moons ago as a child – and if I had exhibited the foresight to keep Roddy 1.0 in mint condition I could probably have sold it to a collector by now and retired rich.?Unfortunately, I was quick to engage Roddy in a series of battles with Randy Savage, Andre the Giant and others - and Roddy soon became a dented dingy mess that was barely useful for continued action figure warfare much less selling at significant proceeds.

Several decades later many of us are more likely to be adventuring in a large dataset than in an imaginary battle dome, but do we treat our data with any more respect than Young Jim treated Roddy 1.0??How often do we get a dataset with unlimited possibility, start banging and shaking it around for insight, and cram the battered results into the nearest container (probably Excel) only to present it as if it is a collector’s item??The answer: (Thankfully) never, as long as semi-structured data is in our lives!

A conference session on JSON and XML may or may not get your adrenaline pumping, but here is why it should.?Whoever designed Roddy 1.0 put ample thought into the stylings and presentation.?The cardboard/plastic packaging accentuated and protected the various design elements – it showed us everything we needed to know about the asset, and even enriched it with sleek, form-fitting enclosure that not only protected Roddy – but also facilitated transfers, and succinctly characterized key capabilities like the “Piper Punch”.?Nobody could slay Roddy – until you took him out of the package.

For actuaries, tools like Excel make it too easy to start playing around with our data before we even put it in the package, much less extract it.?We may even think of our analysis tools as the asset itself rather than package that houses it. ?Doing so forgoes all the protections and enrichment possibilities previously described, and stymies the design thinking implicit in viewing our analyses as potential collectors’ items.?Would we sketch the Mona Lisa using Excel’s pixels and color palette (OK, maybe bad example …)?

No spoilers!?Check out the session whether you already have strong opinions on this topic (if so bring them and drop them in the Q&A, and let's do battle!) or wouldn’t know JSON from a guy in a hockey mask – prior knowledge optional, fun mandatory.?In conclusion, action figures are NOT toys.?