"Yes, I know the three-month average is 45.2, but what does it mean? We have over 2 terabytes of data now. But what does it tell us?"
Your boss is in one of his moods again. He is peppering you with questions, and you are not sure how to answer. Your first instinct was to spit back numbers from the weekly reports, but it obviously did not work.
"Is the data even any good?" he continues, "Are we building up value or just cluttering up the basement with junk?"
You start to shrug but wisely stop yourself. You think the data is very valuable, but you actually do not know much about the dataset beyond the numbers that are included in the reports you have been asked to develop. You realize you are not even sure what the individual data records look like. You know that averages can hide a lot of things, but...