Читать книгу Smarter Data Science - Cole Stryker - Страница 36

The word aye is British English for “yes.” The heading therefore reads as “Yes, a Prerequisite.” As a pun and wordplay, the pronunciation “eye, a prerequisite” sounds the same as “IA prerequisite” where IA are the initials for information architecture, a focus topic of this book. Therefore, the heading also reads: “information architecture prerequisite.”

All organizations, regardless of size and industry vertical, are actively engaged on a journey to Valhalla: a place of honor, glory, and sustained organizational happiness. This journey, with all of its twists and turns, involves the need to embrace analytics. The recent collective embrace of analytics stems from the observation that analytics has become the low-hanging fruit for addressing organizational change. The expression low-hanging fruit refers to tasks or actions that are most easily achieved. The analogy comes from the very literal task of picking fruit off a tree without the need to use a ladder. But organizations that believe they can retain their operational status quo run the risk of irrelevance or eventually obsolescence. For many organizations, analytics is now a vehicle for helping organizations figure out what can be done now and what can be done next.

Although AI and enabling technologies can carry a higher degree of panache, many of the foundational skills required to fully deliver on AI's promise are not well honed. These fundamentals of information architecture aim to address the problem of deriving value from data, which is inherently inert, not self-aware, and not self-organizing. Information architecture addresses these characteristics of data and aims to organize and contextualize data so that it can be mined for value.