An almond farmer in Jbel Saghro (Morocco), curious about tomato prices in the Casablanca wholesale market more than 500 km away.
All 360 managers of a restaurant chain try to log in to a web app simultaneously, causing the server to crash. Why? It's Monday at 9:00 am, and the week's figures have just been published.
Phones ring non-stop moments after corporate bankers receive their monthly results requesting clarifications and corrections.
A physician in a busy hospital momentarily holds back before seeing the next patient, waiting for the department manager's revised shift schedule following a sudden influx of trauma patients.
An OEM R&D manager asks for more detailed breakdowns and visualizations every day after they've received their first-ever monthly expenses detailed report.
These are all manifestations of the dataphagy phenomenon.
No one is immune.
Different contexts, different degrees of digital savviness, and different levels of numerical literacy.
The pattern remains the same: an individual who hadn't actively sought out a specific data point receives it for the first time, has a visceral reaction, and then begins to crave more.
It's an immediate addiction to data following the initial taste, leading to an insatiable appetite for more. The familiar metaphor of chip addiction is spot on: start with one, and moments later, you've consumed the whole bag because you just can't help yourself.
It's the same with data, but the good news is that this bag is bottomless.
The phenomenon impacts diverse groups, as described in the real-life examples provided by various projects.
Regardless of who you are, you can't ignore data, even if it's unsolicited or somewhat peripheral to your interests.
You will have a reaction.
Surprise ("So, Guatemala is actually richer than Morocco?"), joy ("Yes! The wild panda population grew by 17% between 2003 and 2014!"), anger ("This can't be right, there's no way I underperformed this quarter. The data is flawed!"), disappointment ("Commodity prices might not reach last year's levels").
While the intrinsic reasons that trigger dataphagy might be fascinating - the deep-seated curiosity, the drive for comparison (as Talleyrand noted: "When I look at myself, I despair; when I compare myself, I feel better") - they're not my focus.
What I want to understand is how to kickstart dataphagy. Its recurrence is powerful, but how do you convince someone to look at this data for the first time?
It's a question we wrestle with at REKOLT: how to ignite dataphagy. Particularly when you don't usually have access to a potential client's data. Sharing external market data, and providing benchmarks that might spark curiosity about how a company measures up - these are some preliminary thoughts.
But the quest to trigger dataphagy is an ongoing challenge.
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Meryem