Data, Data Everywhere

And Not a Drop of Insight

“Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink.” Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of those poems we might half remember but probably don’t recollect from were. Its central theme of a ship becalmed, a crew surrounded by abundance they cannot use feels oddly familiar in the age of data.

Coleridge’s mariner is not merely unlucky; he is the architect of his own misery. He shoots the albatross, the very creature guiding the ship to safety, and condemns himself to drift on a glittering, useless ocean. The punishment is psychological as much as physical. The sea is everywhere he looks, yet none of it can sustain him. The crew shrinks, the ship rots, and the mariner is left to contemplate the consequences of mistaking action for wisdom.

It is a scene of paralysis masquerading as progress and it is uncomfortably familiar.

Ban Ki moon warned in 2008 that water scarcity could fuel conflict. The irony, of course, is that the planet is drowning in water. Three quarters of the Earth’s surface is covered by it, yet less than one percent is drinkable. The rest is either salted or frozen. Abundance without utility.

Modern organisations have recreated this predicament in digital form. They boast of being “data rich”, as if the mere accumulation of terabytes of the stuff is a sign of enlightenment. They speak in the language of yottabytes and zettabytes, as though vocabulary itself were a strategy. But like Coleridge’s mariner, they find themselves adrift and surrounded by oceans of information they cannot meaningfully consume.

It has been estimated that by 2007 the world had amassed 295 exabytes of stored information. At the turn of the millennium most of it had been analogue but within just seven years almost all of it was digital. This shift was exasperated as most data was being created in digital form. The change was seen as progress, yet the same problem persisted: more data, less understanding.

The telecoms industry saw the tide turning early. By 2010, mobile data traffic had overtaken voice calls for the first time. The FT noted that data volumes were tripling annually. The deluge had begun. But the assumption that more data would automatically yield more insight has proved as misguided as the mariner’s fateful shot.

Coleridge gives us a vivid image of stagnation:

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

It is hard to imagine a better description of the average corporate Data Warehouse, Data Lake or even data Lakehouse. Vast, impressive, immobile. A monument to potential rather than achievement.

If Coleridge’s mariner teaches us anything, it’s that drifting is a choice. He had the means to navigate, but not the discipline. Modern organisations are in the same boat. They can keep congratulating themselves on the size of their data oceans, or they can start asking the only question that matters: what can we actually use?

So, here’s the challenge. Look at your own organisation. Are you sailing or merely floating? Are you extracting insight or admiring the volume? Are you building the structures that turn data into decisions, or are you hoping that meaning will somehow rise to the surface on its own? Reach out as I would love to hear your thoughts.