In general, the concept of data-ism is useful in the business world, where many companies may not have gone much further than a big data approach to helping them aggregate or mine copious amounts of data for different applications and business processes. Experts talk about data for data’s sake and how this philosophy is not sufficient to craft very customized enterprise resource planning setups. New cloud hosting solutions and other sophisticated data systems have led to the rise of data skeptics, who push back against the idea that good data handling can provide infinite results without other types of planning.

Another idea that goes along the pushback against data-ism is the idea that big data can also have inherent dangers. Many of these are related to personal or business privacy. The idea is that the more capable data mining systems become, the more businesses and government agencies can use these systems to spy on consumers or citizens in many different ways. Some of these concerns can also apply within the business community. The idea that data is a double-edged sword is part of why the term data-ism may continue to gain popularity within the IT media.