Business

I was in Southern California last week meeting with an angel investor group.  On Thursday morning I pulled away from my meetings to get together with a friend of mine at a Starbucks in Anaheim, CA.  We had a great discussion about business, culture and community. 

I was talking with Jeff about the web intelligence business I was presenting to the angel investor group.  He had some interesting insights on the ethical issues raised through questions and reports in data-extensive industries.  This is something I have noticed as becoming more of an issue in SaaS industries in my legal technology consulting and SaaS law practice.  

In business we are always looking for answers.  For Internet based companies, the amount of data that can be collected and reported upon is staggering.  This data can be used to answer millions of questions.  It is not all that different than what the accounting industry has had for years.  For large companies, accountants have a ton of data; data that eventually will be compiled into reports – into answers. 

Here is the problem – someone has to ask the right questions before the right answers will be generated.  Further, that person has to be good (I use that in an ethical sense – not necessarily moral sense).  From Enron to Madoff, over the last decade there have been countless examples of smart people purposely misusing data to manipulate and misrepresent answers to others for their own gain. 

This of course can happen with an analytics tool as well.  If there are “bad” people asking the questions, you will get poor answers.

I am paraphrasing here, but Jeff summarized his thinking like this: