Data Limitations

Data analytics is the new king in most businesses.  All departments are making sure that they have a data specialist on board.  While this is great and adding a huge benefit to businesses, there are also limitations to data that we must remain aware of.  We can’t understand the why with pure numbers, we can assume or hypothesize but it doesn’t actually tell us the why.  We can get verification, not validation.  A lot of business issues still call for analyzing the qualitative information i.e. holding in depth focus groups or interviews with users of your product.

If you are in the midst of building a new product, or just rolled out a new product, analytics can tell you how it is or isn’t being used by your customers. However, if no one is using that new feature, analytics can’t tell you why they aren’t using it.  Also, analytics can only provide insights to questions that you ask, but what is you aren’t asking the right questions? All business should be using analytics to help inform their decision making processes, whether around a new product, or where to recruit, but we should also remain aware of the limitations of analytics to ensure that we make the best decisions possible.

https://medium.com/towards-data-science/the-limits-of-analytics-101d93623adf