Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

From Sumerian bean-counters and the librarians at Alexandria, to the editors at Wikipedia, data management is one of the two oldest professions known to humanity.

Today, we build data management systems that attempt to match the logical structure of the world, our language and our thoughts in such a way that we can reason effectively beyond our direct personal experience.

If the data held in these systems is well managed enough (if the data is complete, up to date, relevant, accurate, error-free and properly contextualised), it can endow the data consumer with almost magical power to generate insights and steer complex decisions much more effectively than by relying on human intuition.

The data management machines themselves may not appear particularly magical. In fact, to a non-believer, they might appear rather mundane. A system that allows you to capture events from the world, record them on a durable media, store that media safely for the long haul, and make the contents available to subsequent generations of data consumers, who would otherwise have no direct experience of the original events.

However, to a true believer data management is core to the progress of human society. To put this in context, consider the climate crisis.

Careful management of hundreds of years of historical data about our environment, (encapsulating millions of years of climate related events) has allowed the global scientific community to identify a species limiting event in the future that is not readily observable in the present. Without data management there would be no climate crisis, we’d just be standing around in our gardens asking:

“So Dave, do you think it’s hotter than the summer of ‘76?”

”I don’t know John, do you mean 1976 or 1876?”