This is a sales pitch by HP - they are trying to sell 'big data analytics' to huge clients, like General Electric. Oracle and IBM are also trying to sell this s

This is a sales pitch by HP - they are trying to sell 'big data analytics' to huge clients, like General Electric. Oracle and IBM are also trying to sell this stuff. It's supposed to be the next big thing. I think there is some doubt here that it is valuable, which fails to appreciate scale. If someone said to you 'I don't know why Twitter need all these engineers - I made a site like twitter in 2 hours in an introduction to rails tutorial', you'd explain that scale was the problem. The CEO of Toshiba oversees business units that do nuclear power plants, LCD screens, and business systems. His understanding of any of these units is fairly shallow - he knows less about nuclear power plants than the CEO of that unit, who knows less than his chief engineer. The chief engineer knows less about the workstation login page than the junior who implemented it. When you are working at that scale, your tools and information are limited and broad. You can set budgets, issue directives, and try to create culture. On the other hand, because you are working with large numbers of people (data points), it makes sense to make decisions statistically. When N is 1, you need to make decisions subjectively - it doesn't matter that taking Statins after 50 slightly reduces the chance of heart disease for some people (possibly including you). You decide if you want to take a pill every day, and broadly if you want to do things that are healthy vs things that are enjoyable. For the guy deciding whether to spend millions on Statins as part of your health insurance, it makes total sense - he can model how much heart disease costs, and how much statins reduce that, along with some value placed on an extra year of life, plus something about cost to acquire customers and policy retention, and decide if it's worth the money. So the British NHS decided to give everyone over 50 Statins. The guy in charge of HP can model how much staff churn costs, and assign budgets that are sub divided down by business units. Using this data he can target that budget where it will help the most. And that is all he can do. Another thing is that it doesn't matter if it's a good idea, it matters if someone will pay for it. If HP can demonstrate measurable financial advantage to doing this they can land clients. That's a lot easier to measure = sell than 'not being a douche' training for managers.