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Good Data Won't Guarantee Good Decisions
Global businesses have entered a new era of decision making. The ability to gather, store, access, and analyze data has grown exponentially over the past decade, and companies now spend tens of millions of dollars to manage the information streaming in from suppliers and customers.
For all the breathless promises about the return on investment in Big Data, however, companies face a challenge. Investments in analytics can be useless, even harmful, unless employees can incorporate that data into complex decision making.
Our research offers a succinct warning to managers. At this very moment, there’s an odds-on chance that someone in your organization is making a poor decision on the basis of information that was enormously expensive to collect.
To help organizations measure and improve employees’ facility with data-driven decision making, Corporate Executive Board created the Insight IQ, which assesses the ability to find and analyze relevant information. We evaluated 5,000 employees at 22 global companies and sorted them into three groups. “Unquestioning empiricists” trust analysis over judgment, and “visceral decision makers” go exclusively with their gut. “Informed skeptics”—the employees best equipped to make good decisions—effectively balance judgment and analysis, possess strong analytic skills, and listen to others’ opinions but are willing to dissent. They’re the kind of data-savvy workers every company should try to cultivate. However, we found that only 38% of employees, and 50% of senior managers, fall into this group. Our analysis also showed that functions whose employees had the highest average scores performed about 24% better than other functions across a wide range of metrics, including effectiveness, productivity, employee engagement, and market-share growth.
In addition to quantifying this overall skill deficit, we identified four problems that prevent organizations from realizing better returns on their investment in Big Data:
Analytic skills are concentrated in too few employees. When a new form of analytics enters the workplace, companies typically start by hiring experts versed in using it, reasoning that the skills will trickle down to all. But too many companies are stuck in the “expert” phase. They have a handful of highly skilled analytics professionals but have not begun to train everyone else to make use of their analytics methodology.
IT needs to spend more time on the “I” and less on the “T.” Most IT functions “grew up” working with finance, supply chain, and HR, where business needs are clearly defined, stable, and relatively consistent over a wide group of users. Other departments may have diverse data demands or may need to use data in ways they can’t clearly articulate. Meeting these challenges requires anthropological skills and behavioral understanding—traits that are often in short supply in IT departments.
Reliable information exists, but it’s hard to locate. Many organizations lack a coherent, accessible structure for the data they’ve collected. They’re like libraries with no card catalog and no covers on their books. The rise of social media, new selling channels, and devices such as tablets and smartphones has made it even harder to manage analytic content. Fewer than 44% of employees say they know where to find the information they need for their day-to-day work.
information source：http://hbr.org/2012/04/good-data-wont-guarantee-good-decisions/ar/1
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