As described by Robert S. Seiner in All in the Data: Negative Attitudes and the Four Horsemen of the Data Apocalypse, the four horsemen can be used to describe the negative attitudes organizations have toward data that have prevented these organizations from addressing the need to improve and gain value from their most valuable asset.
Here are those negative attitudes (the four horsemen) explained in a bit more detail:
- Ignorance: The ignorance attitude can be best described as thinking that seeking value from data is not that important.
- Arrogance: The arrogance attitude can be described as the thinking that management knows more than the people that own and are responsible for the data.
- Obsolescence: The obsolescence attitude can be described as thinking that the present data, in the present systems, will never die and that, if it carried the organization this far, and there is no reason to change.
- Power: The power attitude can best be described as the feeling that projects owned by the most influential members of management are more critical than other projects.
You can watch the presentation referred to in the article here on YouTube.com.
