Big Data this, predictive analytics that. Give me a break.

The latest data craze is bound to leave a lasting mark on our society as new positions with cryptic acronym titles are empowering HR and a new breed of nerds alike. Hotels and resorts are also happy: huge conference rooms are full to capacity as corporations fly everyone all over the place to become savvy on, you guessed it, Big Data! Social media is also partaking in the magic: Accenture, CapGemini, IBM, CSC, Booz Allen and many others are promising Nirvana just one click away in sponsored links we all wish we could ignore. But we can’t (ignore Big Data that is). It will have to run its course before people finally catch on to its fallacy.

Let’s put this in terms everyone can understand: fairy tales. The Big Data magic wand will never be able to turn a pumpkin into a beautiful carriage. It will never turn Marriott into Airbnb (pick your choice for the pumpkin here). No matter the power of the predictive analytic engine applied to Marriott’s entire data set to eventually include what its employees had for dinner the night prior, the hidden and non-obvious correlations won’t point to a completely new business model so that Marriott can disrupt itself before it is disrupted by others. There is no such thing. We’ve seen this before when some were trying to run strategy straight out of Excel spreadsheets. Don’t we ever learn?

The only ones who can dream up the future are still those human beings. Daydreaming is still the preferred “method”, with all its lack of process and reliability, and…substantiating data.