The 451 Group’s Matthew Aslett picks up on the same “There’s no such thing as big data” post that inspired my weekly update this week. Aslett quotes a follow-up from Tim O’Reilly, who wrote “companies that have massive amounts of data without massive amounts of clue are going to be displaced by startups that have less data but more clue.” Nicely put, and a point that is becoming increasingly important. It is not sufficient to gather petabytes and petabytes, just because you can. Sometimes, there are situations in which a mass of data can be “explored” in ways that let it “speak to you.” But all too often, it’ll speak complete gibberish. Far better to gather data, and devote time and energy to developing intelligent, thoughtful, questions that the data can help you to answer.  Aslett concludes by stating “there is clearly a balance to be struck, and the answer lies not in ‘big data’ but “more clue,”” and I could not agree more.