The Other CSI Myth

For anyone who remembers 80’s television, there was this show called Quincy that starred Jack Klugman as a pathologist who did forensic investigation into murders. I always had a special place in my heart for the show because my father worked as pathologist at the time and, when asked what my dad did for a living, I would say “he’s like Quincy, but without the solving murders part.” Back then, Quincy was often the only forensic investigator  people (especially kids) had heard of.

Fast forward about 20 years and most everyone knows CSI from the multiple TV dramatizations involving super sharp crime scene investigators using ultra cool technology to solve murder cases and bring perps to justice. Many have also heard that there has been a rise in unreasonable expectations from real people who assume their local forensics teams are staffed and equipped like the shows. There have also been spikes in enrollment in CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) training enrolments.

There is another, more technical myth which seems to be one of the root causes of the “un-reality” portrayed on TV.

The cast usually includes a techno-digital savant who can get anything done through a computer. They whiz and quip their way through impossible searches and triangulations – invariably uncovering a piece of data that helps the good guys win.

“I need a list of all buildings downtown that have southern facing exposures that were built between 1950 and 1960, and used the unique building material found on the vics shoes to seal the roof.”

“One minute, Boss.”

“A whole minute? You must be slipping!”

Maybe I’m stating the obvious, but those random pieces of data are not all sitting around in databases that talk to each other, no matter how talented the person doing the searching – no matter how powerful the computer system being used to to the search. I don’t know what’s more crazy, the idea of public city plans integrated, indexed and codified with that type of information for the past 50 years or the on the fly API creation to extract cohesive data from unknown databases (assuming they are all even online) in a minute or less.  NOT that I have any problem with creative license, I just want to call it out for the sake of emphasizing the role of data strategy as the driver for achieving desired front end interactions.

I can just imagine the aha moment when the people at Epsilon realized, “Hey, we hold all this data. Why not build an agency around it (http://www.epsilon.com/Purple@brepsilon/p32-l1).”  Again, it is not enough to own the right data, its data also control of the warehousing structures that must grow and adapt to ever-increasing complexity of user requirements. And with so many local and SaaS computing solutions and data entry points, only the enterprise level seems to have a shot at unifying the structures well enough to enable true capitalization of business intelligence.

The paradigm of single, unified, all-knowing data systems has not proven workable, yet everyone is clamoring for true connectivity. [It must be true, I saw it work on TV…]. I do believe that whatever solutions emerge in this area for small to mid-size companies will come from those who treat data strategy as an input to creative strategy and not the other way around.