Oklahoma State University – Oklahoma City
Critical Thinking
Lecture Notes Nine
PHIL 1313
Fall 2022
Contents: Using data analysis (Clouds Data) to assist data gathering.
Lecture Notes Nine
In the last ten years, cloud computing paradigms have emerged to extend analytics in exciting new ways.
Today, any organization with an urgent need to extract insights from its data can benefit from cloud
data analytics due to its inherent speed and scale. Cloud analytic systems can do more than simply
provide the infrastructure to store massive amounts of data. Thanks to virtually unlimited compute
power analytic results are virtually instantaneous. This makes cloud data analytics ideal for real-time or
near real-time endeavors such as a marketing team want to assess the impact of a limited-time offer or
promotion through a social media platform.
The cloud can also facilitate widespread collaboration. For example, during the early months of 2020
when the COVID-19 virus was spreading fast, cloud data platform capabilities made it easy to create a
single source for many applicable COVID data sets that spanned organizations and industries. This made
data easily available for investigating public health and business impacts, and provided the huge storage
and concurrency required.
Due to its iterative nature, data analysis is an ideal setting for developing critical thinking. When we
asked Melissa Frazier, a retired vice president for audit and controls for Comfort Systems USA, about
this, she said, “Critical thinking is key through each step in the data analysis process. If you don’t do a
good job on each step, your result will be flawed or useless.”
The relationship also is reciprocal: While analyzing data strengthens critical thinking, critical thinking in
turn helps data analysis. Jeff Thomson explains, “Data analysis and critical thinking skills are
interdependent. Data analysis requires you to think critically by probing, connecting disparate facts,
synthesizing, etc. Likewise, critical thinking is enabled by the ability to think analytically and apply tools
to help extract insights and actionable information from data.”
But how does critical thinking as we define it merge with diagnostic data analysis? We developed a case
study (see “CASE STUDY: Fraudulent Financial Reporting” below) to demonstrate how elements of
critical thinking are needed at each step in the data analysis process. The case centers on Emersyn
Grace, who was hired to establish an internal audit function for ACJ Company, a wholesaler. As she
familiarizes herself with the company’s operations, Emersyn discovers some issues of concern that
require her to employ critical thinking skills while further analyzing the company data.
