Data Silos
Tim Caron Guest Series Part 1/4
[Note from Realize Me] We’re excited to feature this series from Tim Caron, who has been an integral advisor and partner in the development of Realize Me. He has trained elite athletes in football programs from Georgia Tech, USC, and West Point, co-founded Allegiate Gym, and more recently founded pH Podcast, where his book Strength Deficit is available for pre-order. Check out more of his content to learn from one of the greatest minds in fitness as he dives into the foundational principles of performance and health.
Tim Caron Guest Series:
This will be a four part blog series. One of the major things I want to dig into is the value I've gained as a user of Realize Me. Over the next four blogs we are going to go over two major problems with anything data related: siloed data and interpreting data. Addressing these problems is the first priority, and then we will dive into how Realize Me helped solve this for us.
For a lot of people, there is a threshold to cross when deciding to track their performance data on both an individual and a group level. This however, is the wrong concern to be having. The deliberation of what to track or what hardware to use is a fair concern, but the bigger limiting factor will not be what to track or what to track with, but how to manage that information.
Data silos are a huge problem for anyone who is tracking. After getting through the process of deciding what is the best thing to track relative to a goal, and choosing the right tool to track that, you will be soon faced with how to store that information - data silos. You will be faced with several different places where individual metrics are stored creating individual silos. You can look at these silos as bottlenecks in how you will use that information to help you. You will either have to create a dashboard and manually transfer that information over or you will try to interpret the information on individual platforms - both are really inefficient and will come at a cost of actually using that information.
In either scenario, user fatigue will set in. This seemingly well intentioned step will be met with frustration from having to do all these extra steps to evaluate your data. The key behind this is the companies that create hardware or software around tracking work hard into you using their product over others. I would not say that they discourage you from using other tracking tools, but we can all agree that it is not in that company’s best interest to have their users using several platforms at once.
What you will find is that there are several aspects about tracking you will have to unpack. What is the best hardware or software, what is the most reliable, what is the most user friendly, what is the most durable, etc. You can easily be distracted from eventually having to organize, interpret, and use this information to help with training or health. Last thing on your mind when trying to decide what body composition or HRV tracker is how this will migrate to a single dashboard to be able to compare to other data points.
The goal of this first blog is not to intimidate you from tracking, but to bring up a critical point - eventually you will need to evaluate this data. This is what I learned as a person that wants to track for myself and with my clients. There is a bottleneck point when you are faced with the logistics of organizing your data and then interpreting that data.
Check out the next blog in this series on how Realize Me created a solution for that problem.
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