The Sushi Chef Data Analogy
How is the data industry similar to the sushi making industry?
Being in the data industry for a decade, I have a few analogies to describe this whacky industry. My favourite is how a data analyst / scientist is like a sushi chef, and this is one that I use to explain to business owners the importance of setting up a strong data foundation for their analytics journey.
The Sushi Chef
At face value, being a sushi chef seems to be about cutting up fish and packing them onto a palm full of vinegar rice. A bit of research will reveal the necessary work required behind the scenes. From cooking the rice, sourcing seasonal ingredients, storing your ingredients properly, to the preparation work for different types of sushi, there is a lot of foundational work required to bring quality sushi to the table. Slicing the fish and packing the rice is only part of the process.
Relating this analogy to the data industry, the AI and machine learning hype is akin to the sexy sushi making part of slicing fish and packing them onto rice. This is but only a part of the entire data analytics value chain. Unfortunately, many organisations start their analytics journey by jumping straight into the AI and machine learning hype, without first establishing a strong data foundation and culture to build their analytics projects on.
A strong signal of such a company is when you hear statements like “I did not hire you to clean data”. Imagine forcing a sushi chef to make sushi on the spot without giving him time to assess and prepare the kitchen, its wares and available ingredients. Analytics projects implemented without a strong data foundation can lead to misguided insights that were built on problematic, inconsistent, and even erroneous data.
For the fun of it…
This sushi analogy can work on many levels:
What kinds of fish do you have in your fridge? - What kinds of data are you storing?
How do you store your fish? - Is your data warehouse enabling data analytics?
Do you constantly check the quality of your fish supply? - Do you run diagnostic checks on your data quality?
Do you have the necessary kitchen wares to make your sushi? - Do you have the right tools and processes to perform your desired analytics?
Do you need to be located near your fish source? - Do you need real-time analytics, and if so, what benefits does it bring?
Omakase…
One last push of this analogy. The pinnacle of a sushi chef is the omakase sushi chef, where the chef has full autonomy to create dishes based on seasonal ingredients and what he believes is best for the customer, and while the customer is fully onboard to let the chef do their best work for them. I particularly like my analogy to be of a sushi chef (and not of any chef), as it reminds me to strive to be an omakase chef of my industry, where I continually improve my craft (analytics) and to build the trust with my stakeholders so that they will give me the full autonomy to provide the most suitable analytics set up for them, based on my expertise.
Conclusion
The preparation work to create quality sushi is common knowledge among most people nowadays. I hope someday we can say the same for the analytics profession. And I hope to help bridge the gap between what is needed for analytics and what stakeholders expect. Fundamentally, we cannot create quality insights without enough dedication towards our analytics creation process.