Does the Era of Big Data Spell the End of Subject Matter Experts?
Big data and the ability to analyze it, has forever changed the landscape of human talent. It used to be that a person’s professional relevance and value were highly associated with subject-matter expertise. If you possessed domain knowledge, it made you special.
Today, the availability and accessibility of big data means that insights and predictions can be excavated, if you know how to operate the right tools and think analytically. This marks a transition from emphasizing “how much specialized knowledge you have” to “how sharp are your analytical skills”.
Skills Over Knowledge
The human brain is a treasure trove of knowledge accumulated over time. And defining expertise based on how much people know is becoming rapidly outmoded. This is because no matter how good your memory capacity is, you’ll never be able to store more, sort more, and analyze more data than software and machines can. What psychologists call the brain’s “working memory” is limited, and a typical person can only do so much mental information retrieval and analysis simultaneously.
I’m not tossing out the value of experience wholesale. I’m disposing of the tendency to over index on knowledge-based expertise. When information is abundantly available in the form of big data…
