Your Coffee Business Has Data. But Is It Useful? (Oscar Montoya) | EP1696 Part 1 of 5 | Map It Forward
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Episode Description
This is part 1 of a new 5-part series on The Daily Coffee Pro Podcast by Map It Forward, hosted by Lee Safar. Our guest on the podcast for this series is Oscar Montoya, a data scientist, software developer, coffee producer in Colombia, founder of Cafe Chicao in Canada, and the developer (from Dark Mode) who helped Map It Forward build CoffeeListings.com.
In this episode, Lee and Oscar explore the difference between data and information and why that distinction matters for coffee businesses.
Oscar explains that data by itself is simply raw material. It only becomes useful when it is cleaned, organized, analysed, and transformed into information that can help someone understand what is happening and decide what to do next.
Using examples from his own coffee farms in Colombia, Oscar explains how questions about planting density, shade, production, fertilizer, labour and farm sustainability determine what data is actually worth collecting.
The conversation also explores why collecting everything simply because we can may create more complexity rather than better decisions, and introduces the relationship between people, processes, technology and data.
Technology should support a real problem rather than become the objective itself. As Oscar explains, technology for the sake of technology is just hype. The starting point should be the people and the problem we are trying to solve.
Connect with Oscar Montoya here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oscar-montoyah/