Hard Copy | from the Editor’s Desk: the Data Revolution

written by Scott Cullen | October 12, 2018

Data, data everywhere, but how it’s used is what really matters.

Thank you, Bill Gates, for turning me onto “21 Lessons for the 21st Century” by Yuval Noah Harari. After reading Gates’ front-page review in The New York Times Book Review (September 9, 2018), I had to buy the book, especially given its discussion of data.

In the bestseller, Harari, a professor specializing in world history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, identifies what he considers today’s greatest challenges and most important changes with an emphasis on what changes we should be paying attention to, including the impact of technology on our lives. The book is structured in four parts, The Technological Challenge, The Political Challenge, Despair and Hope, Truth, and Resilience. Each section contains four to five chapters. In Part 1, The Technological Challenge, the chapters encompass disillusionment, work, liberty, and equality.

Gates’ review was positive with reservations, noting he didn’t agree with everything in the book and would have liked to have seen more nuance in the author’s discussion of data and privacy, for example. Both topics were discussed in Part 1.

As Gates wrote, “[Harari] rightly notes that more information is being gathered on individuals than ever before. But he doesn’t distinguish among the types of data being collected””the kind of shoes you like to buy versus which diseases you’re genetically predisposed to””or who is gathering it, or how they’re using it.”

The subhead for the chapter on Equality is “Those Who Own the Data Own the Future.” With our industry’s emphasis on data, this was a particularly compelling chapter, notwithstanding Gates’ comment about nuance. Harari contends that in the 21st century, politics will be a struggle to control the flow of data. He posits the race to obtain the data is already on, led by Google, Facebook, Baidu, and Tencent. And he raises the possibility that humans and machines might merge so completely in the future, thanks to biometrics, that humans will not be able to survive if they are disconnected from the network. A lot of us know how that feels already.

This discussion got me thinking about the data we collect from dealers for our Annual Dealer Surveys, even if there isn’t an obvious comparison between how we and our readers use that data and Harari’s observations about how companies and governments could use data in the future. There is nothing nefarious going on here, I promise you. While our Survey findings don’t always deviate much from year to year, they often validate what our readers are experiencing and what we are seeing and hearing when researching and writing articles and attending industry events.

Mostly, what our Survey reveals, in the words of the newscaster Walter Cronkite, is “and that’s the way it is.” While that may sound simplistic, the data doesn’t lie. It may get skewed when the number of participants representing an OEM are low, but overall, we believe the data and trends we present in our Annual Dealer Survey offers an accurate representation of what’s going on in the imaging industry and in the dealer community.

The data from our survey doesn’t necessarily mean you, the reader, always need to take immediate action, but hopefully, it does provide you with action items to think about as you prepare your dealership for the future””a future that will increasingly be shaped by data, more than we could ever imagine today.

ScottSig