Recently published strategic guidance for Defence, notably the strategic priorities and goals of the MoD’s Chief Information Officer expressed in the Enabling Warfare in the Information Age strategy, alongside the recently published guidance on Defence Transformation, implores Defence to become more data-driven and to treat data as a strategic asset. The media, the technology industry and defence consultancies have been in overdrive as a result of the hot topic of ‘big data’. An abundance of similar terms is also found in Defence concept papers – namely ‘artificial intelligence’ (AI), ‘analytics’, ‘machine learning’ and so on.

This article argues that the benefits of data analytics have been overhyped, and that data exploitation investments often fail due to a lack of realism.