This weekend I’m in Copenhagen where I, opposite to when in London, enjoy a bicycle ride.
In the old days I had a small cycle computer that gave you a few key performance indicators about your ride as time of riding, distance covered, average and maximum speed. Today you can use an app on your smartphone and along the way have current figures displayed on your smartwatch.
As explained in the post American Exceptionalism in Data Management the first thing I do when installing an app is to change Fahrenheit to Celsius, date format to an useable one and in this context not at least miles to kilometers.
The cool thing is that the user interface on my smartwatch reports my usual speed in kilometer per hour as miles per hour making me 60 % faster than I used to be. So next year I will join Tour de France making Jens Voigt (aka Der Alte) look like a youngster.
Using such an app is also a good example of why we have big data today. The app tracks a lot of data as detailed route on map with x, y and z coordinates, split speed per kilometer and other useful stuff. Analyzing these data tells me Tour de France maybe isn’t a good idea. After what I thought was 100 miles, but was 100 kilometers, my speed went from slow to grandpa.
That’s a bit like IT projects by the way. Regardless of timeframe, they slows down in progress after 80 % of plan has been covered.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
Ha! Although I call/treat myself more American than an Indian these days, I still sneak out and check the temperature in degree celcious before heading out in the morning. And definitely I can’t disagree with you about IT projects. 😀
Degrees Celsius or degrees Fahrenheit, 100 miles or even 100 kilometres. Either way it’s a big task or asking a lot which concatenated becomes a “big ask” as the Americans would say!