The key to a happy life might just be a well designed Essbase Cube
Posted by jim omalley on Wed, Jan 13, 2010 @ 10:22 AM
The Key to a Happy Life Might Just be a Well-Designed Essbase Cube.
A recent ‘Biggest Loser' contest in the office had me thinking about data. OK, pretty much everything in my life makes me think about the data-it's a job hazard. But this contest had me tracking things I'd never paid much attention to. I'm counting calories at every turn, weighing myself every morning, charting my progress in a spreadsheet, and forecasting my percentage of weight loss as well as that of my competitors.
And that got me to thinking...
Science and technology have us at a point that we can track virtually unlimited things about ourselves. We carry personal devices with computing power that makes even our desktop computers of 5 years ago seem silly. Devices that can track our location and the location of our friends ride around in our pocket like a pack of chewing gum (low-cal sugarless gum, of course...but I digress). Modern software has taken to whole new levels our ability to track our personal finances, personal schedule, blood sugar levels, the pace of our heart, the words we speak, the number of key strokes we type, and on and on. With very little effort, and with a high degree of accuracy, we could track where we spend out time (and with whom we spend it), the pattern and intensity of our speech, and more. (Btw-I'm guessing there are a wireless scale and an app to read and chart your weight. If not, there should be.)
So with some investment in portable data collection apps, we could track an endless amount of data about ourselves. Very cool! But what does it all mean? I don't know, but I can imagine. I can imagine the possibility of saving a few bucks personally (and tons of carbon emissions globally) when we pull the data together and realize that on days when our schedule is most busy, our gas mileage suffers most (triggering a schedule minder alert on busy days reminding us to not be so heavy on the pedal). Or even better, what if we could measure happiness? They used to have mood rings that purported to monitor our every mood. So what if we had something that actually quantified that mood, logged it, and correlated it against every other thing we could choose to measure-like how much sleep we get per night, how much time we spend with our loved ones, and so on. Sweet! Next step? Let's drop that data in an aggregate storage cube, layer on Visual Explorer, and suddenly Larry Ellison becomes our self-help guru and puts Tony Robbins out of business (look for project Data Utopia to kick off in the near future ;-)!
OK, so happiness isn't necessarily a practical measure to capture, but maybe there is something with a more immediate return. Perhaps through capturing our own personal metrics we can correlate our own productivity to our commute, time with family, or even the right number of calories! Or, perhaps to the horror of the ACLU, corporations will get involved and seek to identify statistical consistencies in their top performers. Who knows where the collective corporate imagination might lead. Perhaps they will ask their top sales people to self-collect data, looking for what common traits they possess in an effort to increase the productivity of the entire force. Or insurance companies will offer us substantial discounts for providing them with constant weight measurement. Perhaps they'll even quantify exactly what work-life balance really does produce the best result.
Whether or not we ever reach such heights of data analysis, PDAs are becoming more powerful and ubiquitous every second-and the amount of data being collected about us is on an exponential growth curve. It seems only logical that the two collide.
Article written by Abe Combs
(Who, at time of authorship, was exactly 20lbs lighter than his starting weight. )
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