Our Philosophy.

At Lucid Data we believe that all businesses can leverage the power latent in their data to improve the effectiveness of their business and deliver more value to their customers. We believe that pragmatic and iterative paths can be charted through the most challenging technical, organizational, and cultural challenges surrounding data. Challenges that too frequently plague, prolong, or prevent businesses from realizing the return on their investments in data.

Our goal at Lucid Data is to assist our client with embracing a data architecture and ownership model that supports and reinforces enterprise-wide data utility, clarity, and reliability!

Utility

Data must be useful. Just because data exists it doesn’t mean that data is inherently useful for much of anything. The signal-to-noise ratio of “raw” data is very low. The unfortunate reality at many companies is that data is often incomplete, incorrect, or misleading. For data to be useful it must be shaped, structured, and validated for its intended use cases. Too often poorly understood and malformed input data is quickly put to work generating misleading and incorrect output data.

Clarity

Data (and its ownership) must be clear. Even if the signal-to-noise ratio in your data is high and your data is well-structured to be useful if it is not clearly understood by those seeking to use it that utility becomes inaccessible to them. This need for clarity in data extends to data ownership as well as the data itself. Too often data ownership is poorly defined or misplaced which directly impacts the clarity of data (and ultimately its utility).

Reliability

Data must be reliable. Once data has been structured and validated for use and made understandable and accessible to those meant to consume it, assurance must be put into place to ensure that it is delivered promptly and reliably. Stale data or data containing gaps or errors can lead to unreliable data being surfaced to human or machine agents, which in turn can lead to delayed, suboptimal, or erroneous actions being taken on that data.

Data Mesh

For those with a technical bent, we firmly believe that the coming Data Mesh socio-technical shift will profoundly change how organizations understand, utilize, and relate to their data. This shift will be similar to how Platform Enablement, DevOps, IaaS changed how technical organizations related to their infrastructure in the 2000s and 2010s. While Data Mesh is not yet a well-defined set of solutions that can be pulled off of the shelf like AWS for infra, its principles can be meaningfully put into practice today to help businesses deliver more value from their data at lower cost!

If you’re interested in learning more about the Data Mesh architectural philosophy and its principles we suggest reading: