Data-driven business strategy

Dateline: October 16, 2015

Welcome to our Friday WRAP – one thought-provoking idea to think about over the weekend.

Decision making is, of course, one of the key functions of senior leaders.  Those with lots of experience are expected to make better decisions because of what they have seen, done and learned in their career.  But increasingly we are hearing that data-driven decision making is out-performing non-data driven decisions on every measure.  Recently, Nate Silver, blogger and statistician who rose to prominence after correctly predicting the winner of the US Presidential election of 49 of 50 states in 2008 (and all of them in 2012), was quoted by Ed Burns at TechTarget  about where analytics fits in to the organizational decision making process and what gets in the way of leaders using these tools.  Nate suggests,

[The] lack of standardization and best practices rears its head in the form of biased analyses and misleading visualizations, Silver said. Not that any of this is intentional, but in his view people are hard-wired to see connections that may not exist or apply causality to an event for which there may only be a correlation. Too often assumptions get suppressed in order to make an analysis look valid, when instead the preconceptions should be stated transparently.

What gets in the way of your organization embracing data-driven decision making?

That’s a WRAP!  Have a great weekend!

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