Are We Facing a Data Dark Age?

Growing up in England, history and archaeology were always part of the culture in which we lived. The part that fascinated me the most was The Dark Ages. They began in 410 AD when the Roman legions were withdrawn from the island of Britain. The Dark Ages ended, according to many, in 1066 when the English finally annihilated Viking power, only to be conquered in the same year by the Normans.

What happened in England is only one example of a Dark Age. There have been many others at different times in different parts of the world. What are the characteristics of a Dark Age? Here is my personal list:

·       Disruption of cultural transmission

·       Disruption of supply networks

·       Collapse of central authority

·       Unavailability of technical skills

·       Dark Ages happen relatively suddenly

·       Loss of key data/information assets - either physical loss or inability to utilize

·       Loss of social capital – key relationship networks, network knowledge,

·       Loss of informal, non-transferable capital – key people know how to make things work

So what has any of this to do with data? My personal suspicion is that for many organizations the current Covid-19 crisis is going to send them into their own Dark Age. At least some of the characteristics listed above seem to resonate with what is happening today for some enterprises. Let’s quickly look at cultural transmission and skills. 

End of Cultural Transmission

Living in the United States is very different to living in the UK. The history is presented as a march of progress, albeit with major setbacks. There are no Dark Ages in American History. They happened long ago, and to other people. So, another personal suspicion is that the decisions are now being taken by US business leaders do not take into account how data-centric their organizations have become, and, the how valuable data is. Consequently, they susceptible they are to lasting damage.

Let us look at something that is well-understood. Knowledge about data and data processes is not documented in most US organizations. It is “tribal”. Information Knowledge Management has never been a priority for most of the leaders of these organizations. Hence, when there is a need to cut back, to save money, in order to survive, knowledge about data and data processes is not likely to be a consideration. 

This means that there is an end to cultural transmission of knowledge for at least a portion of the data and data processes in the organization.

The business leaders may conceive of their organizations as a machine, like a lawn mower that has been turned off, that just needs to be started up again. That does not work with data and information. Without understanding the meaning of data, why we do things the way we do, and how we do them, the data-centric processes cannot simply be started up again. Nor can someone be called into look at the situation and easily figure it out. This is not an engineering problem. It is a data and information problem.

Therefore, to the extent that “subject matter experts” are being laid off in highly impacted industries like travel, hospitality, food service, and so on, real damage is being done, even if this is not understood at the moment.

To reverse engineer and rebuild will take years, and may not even be possible depending on what has been lost.

Unavailability of Skills

With the growth of financialization in the US economy – the orientation to debt-based financial engineering (to drive “shareholder value”) at the expense of customers, employees, and society, there has been relatively little interest in investing to build real skills in the workforce. Correspondingly, there has been little desire on the part of recent generations to make the effort to acquire difficult-to-learn skills.  Using technology and immigrant labor (including myself) has been seen as the solution to this need. Data-related skills are quite difficult to acquire, perhaps because data is a set of abstract concepts that need to be manipulated mentally while maintaining coherence, rather than physical objects that follow pre-defined laws of physics. Whatever the reason, there seems to be a deficit of these skills just when they are needed. By the time the Dark Ages came to England trade networks seem to have led to the decline of local skills. For instance, there were places where the skills to produce pottery were lost, and people ate from wooden bowls for many decades until these skills we relearned. 

Conclusion

Hopefully we are not facing a full-scale collapse like Dark Age England, or even worse, something like the multi-civilization Bronze Age collapse of 1177 B.C.  But for vulnerable organizations that shed staff who understand data and data processes, and who have needed data-centric skills, these organizations will face a Dark Age. The reliance on data and information is just too great today. Admittedly, the victims are most likely to be organizations in the highly impacted sectors. Perhaps there is still time to consider the role of data-centric knowledge and skills, but time is short. Those companies that ignore such knowledge and skills may never be able to survive. 

The need to capture data and information assets – or capital if you want to call it that - has never been so important. Destruction will be fast and non-reversible unless action is taken now.