The Information Age: Driving the Need for Data Fluency

Fantastic advances in data storage capacity have fundamentally changed the trade-offs we need to make regarding what to keep and what to delete. Rather than having to carefully decide what elements of our digital reality to capture and which to throw away, we can now keep everything. We can have it all—and we do. According to independent research organization SINTEF (The Foundation for Scientific and Industrial Research), 90 percent of all the data in the world has been generated over the last two years.¹ With more Instagram pictures, more tweets, more history of where customers go on the web, we are rapidly growing the amount of data we can sift through.

In a sense, the raw materials for informed decision-making have never been more plentiful. Yet the promise of data nirvana still seems far off. Students, scholars, employees, and executives are often still making crude decisions based on chance, gut, or whims of the crowd...