In recent years I have become less interested in the technology itself and more interested in our relationship with the technology.

Information technology has become ubiquitous; we are permanently connected and carry little supercomputers around in our pockets. This technology seeps into almost every aspect of our lives and changes how we live, work and communicate. But the incredible power that Moore’s Law has given us is masked by an impenetrable lexicon of terminology; we now live in a world of zettabytes, petaflops and yottahertz.

A brief history of data analysis

We analyse data to try and understand something about the real world that the data puports to represent. The use of information technology allows us to do this at a scale and speed that delivers far greater value than if we were using paper and pencils.

My first job after leaving school was for the Rolls-Royce Military Engine Group in Bristol. This was 1987 and my work involved running overnight batch jobs on a mainframe computer, picking up the printed output the following day and producing a monthly digest of business statistics.

In the 1990s I moved into higher education and it became clear that aspirations around the use of technology were growing. We didn’t talk about statistics any more because this was the era of management information; and information is better than statistics.

In the 2000s, data processing systems were becoming faster and more powerful; thank you Moore’s Law. We stopped generating management information because this was the era of business intelligence. Intelligence is better than information, of course.

By the 2010s the language had shifted again and we began to seek insights from data. Insight is deep and meaningful; much better than intelligence.

In the 2020s the language is shifting again and the Office for Students adopted the term foresight for its data and analysis activity. The term foresight shifts the perspective from using data to understand how the world is to understanding how it will be in the future.

In summary, the language has inflated every decade or so:

So Youell’s Law is…..

…the observation, based on this inflation in our language, that the expectations of value that can be derived from data is increasing exponentially.

I’m obviously leaning heavily (and shamelessly) into the analysis that Gordon Moore presented in 1965.

This is arguably fair since this growth in expectations has been fuelled by the exponential increase in the power of information technology that Moore’s Law describes. In this sense, Youell’s Law is the human reaction to Moore’s Law.

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