A story in the Atlantic – Why Poor Schools Can’t Win At Standardized testing – illustrates the limits of Big Data.
When Meredith Broussard tried to computerise the text book inventory of her son’s school district she found the project limited by poor systems, fragmented record keeping and siloed management.
Broussard found the records were manually collated, collected on Microsoft Word documents and emailed to an under resourced office that entered details into an Excel Spreadsheet.
The Philadelphia schools don’t just have a textbook problem. They have a data problem—which is actually a people problem. We tend to think of data as immutable truth. But we forget that data and data-collection systems are created by people.
The human factor is a key limitation with any technology; if people aren’t collecting or using data properly than the best computer system in the world is useless. Garbage In, Garbage Out is a long standing IT industry saying.
Management systems are more than computer networks, they go to the very core of an organisation’s culture which in itself is probably a better indicator of how well a company or institution will survive the current period of change.
Were the Philadelphia public school system a business it would be a very good example of a company on its way to being digital roadkill, that it’s an educational network should worry anybody concerned about the economy’s future. That’s a bigger issue than Big Data.