Big data has been touted as a way for firms in financial services, retail and other sectors to get a better handle on their customer’s behaviour and, ideally, increase the volume of business they get from them. Tom pointed out that the situation is a lot messier in an organization like Public Health Ontario, an arms-length provincial agency which is mandated to test and assess potential risks across a wide array of problems.

“Mostly the health system talks about health conditions. Once you get sick, we kind of know what to do,” he explained. “Public Health is about input — it’s about getting at prevention, at control, what happens before you get the condition. As your grandmothers all told you, that ounce of prevention thing really is important.”

It’s also a particularly complex task, because health can be adversely affected by so many different factors. These include genetics, environmental conditions, socio-economic conditions such as income and more. The link between cause and effect, Tom said, can be considerably long.

“I would say that (in the case of marketing analytics), there’s a fairly good idea of what the difference between the signals versus the noise,” he said. “When your’e tracking what a customer’s doing on your Web site, you know what they’re doing. There’s not a lot of noise there. When you’re trying to track what causes someone’s cancer, there’s a lot of noise.”