Steve, the way you describe it I think you're confusing ideas with evidence.

Data is never going to tell you what to do directly. For that you'd need an idea.

Once you have the idea the next part is collecting the evidence to tell you its a good one.

If you have several 'competing' ideas the evidence can then tell you which one is the best of the bunch.

Without the story line the collected data is just that: collected data. (e.g.if you had a database of the location of every atom in the Universe it still wouldn't tell you a whole lot about the Universe).

Chris.