Welcome

Thank you for purchasing the MEAP of The Art of Data Usability. I'm very excited about this book and I hope it will help you hone your data skills from the first page.

I think it's safe to say that data science has exploded in popularity the last few years. That's actually not surprising because the power that data science wields enables us make better decisions; decisions based on facts and observations. It helps us analyze and innovate faster, and understand the „smørgåsbord“ of data we have access to.

Even with all this data being generated around us and the clear willingness to make the most of it, too little thought is put into making the data useful. We're kind of throwing it all against the wall to see what sticks; hoping that users of the data can, with some amount of magical data fairy dust, just make it work. In the end, we're all working with data to help someone and to maximize the opportunities of our data, we need to focus on data usability.

You'll quickly see that data usability is all about quality. The book is founded in tried and true quality management methods that shape the way we work, and how we can iteratively make data more useful but there's one benefit that data has over most other subjects of quality management: data is most often digital so we can automate a lot of the work.