Nashville Technology Blog (6/24/2010)
We are surrounded by a nearly overwhelming amount of data, all the time, in almost every facet of our lives. If we’re not, it’s only because we haven’t looked for it, or begun harvesting it. But it’s there. The systems in our environment are measurable, and in large part, they are measured. But what does it mean to have such a wealth of data? What can we do with so much data?
In our businesses, there is data about customers. There is data about operations. There is financial data, marketing data, and data about employees. Your specific business has its own data niches: in health care there is patient data, provider data, government data, and on and on.
But who is responsible for managing this data? Who is responsible for making sense of it? And what does it mean to make sense of it? Who defines what happens once the data makes sense?
Call it business intelligence, call it analytics, call it what you like: the data we amass in our business lives has rich possibilities for providing insights to our businesses. And those insights have implications for profit maximization, for operational efficiencies — even for improved quality of life.
But the act of finding those insights can be a challenge unto itself. How much insight you glean often depends on how closely you look.
Look too closely, and you may not see.
Like an impressionist painting, the picture as a whole loses clarity when you lean in to examine the brushstrokes. As a Chicago area native and an ‘80s teen, I was always fond of the scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off that took place in the Art Institute of Chicago when Ferris’s friend Cameron is staring at the painting of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat. The longer Cameron stares at the painting, the more he begins to see only the canvas and the dots of paint on the canvas, and the less he sees the picture itself.
The name for this technique in art is pointillism. By creating many small dots of color, the artist can create the overall impression of an image in our perception. We have to be willing to allow ourselves to focus at the right level of detail in order to see it.
In much the same way that too much detail can blind us to the bigger picture, sometimes too much analysis can lead to inaction. If we spend too much time looking for the big insights and not enough time implementing the small insights you find, we miss out on incremental gains in efficiency and profitability we could be making in the short term.
And perhaps a more common problem is you’re not looking closely enough.
Top-level data is satisfying, in some ways. We can view a report and feel like we’ve checked that box off of our list. But what have we learned? What actionable information can we take away from that data?
It’s tempting sometimes to get intellectually lazy; to let reports come in and not really look at them, or to look at them but not get curious about them. And the same old reports day after day, week after week usually won’t tell you a story the way deep dives into data can.
But those deep dives require time and an intense willingness to see what is often nearly imperceptible; to look beyond the dots, those individual data points, and allow your mind to create a picture of something meaningful. And then DO something with the meaning you find.
Member Blogger
Kate O’Neill
[meta]marketer
kate@metamarketer.com
http://metamarketer.com
We are surrounded by a nearly overwhelming amount of data, all the time, in almost every facet of our lives. If we’re not, it’s only because we haven’t looked for it, or begun harvesting it. But it’s there. The systems in our environment are measurable, and in large part, they are measured. But what does it mean to have such a wealth of data? What can we do with so much data?
In our businesses, there is data about customers. There is data about operations. There is financial data, marketing data, and data about employees. Your specific business has its own data niches: in health care there is patient data, provider data, government data, and on and on.
But who is responsible for managing this data? Who is responsible for making sense of it? And what does it mean to make sense of it? Who defines what happens once the data makes sense?
Call it business intelligence, call it analytics, call it what you like: the data we amass in our business lives has rich possibilities for providing insights to our businesses. And those insights have implications for profit maximization, for operational efficiencies — even for improved quality of life.
But the act of finding those insights can be a challenge unto itself. How much insight you glean often depends on how closely you look.
Look too closely, and you may not see.
Like an impressionist painting, the picture as a whole loses clarity when you lean in to examine the brushstrokes. As a Chicago area native and an ‘80s teen, I was always fond of the scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off [ link to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNMXbeaKeak#t=20s ] that took place in the Art Institute of Chicago when Ferris’s friend Cameron is staring at the painting of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat [ link to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sunday_Afternoon_on_the_Island_of_La_Grande_Jatte ]. The longer Cameron stares at the painting, the more he begins to see only the canvas and the dots of paint on the canvas, and the less he sees the picture itself.
The name for this technique in art is pointillism. By creating many small dots of color, the artist can create the overall impression of an image in our perception. We have to be willing to allow ourselves to focus at the right level of detail in order to see it.
In much the same way that too much detail can blind us to the bigger picture, sometimes too much analysis can lead to inaction. If we spend too much time looking for the big insights and not enough time implementing the small insights you find, we miss out on incremental gains in efficiency and profitability we could be making in the short term.
And perhaps a more common problem is you’re not looking closely enough.
Top-level data is satisfying, in some ways. We can view a report and feel like we’ve checked that box off of our list. But what have we learned? What actionable information can we take away from that data?
It’s tempting sometimes to get intellectually lazy; to let reports come in and not really look at them, or to look at them but not get curious about them. And the same old reports day after day, week after week usually won’t tell you a story the way deep dives into data can.
But those deep dives require time and an intense willingness to see what is often nearly imperceptible; to look beyond the dots, those individual data points, and allow your mind to create a picture of something meaningful. And then DO something with the meaning you find.
Jason Kelley, Director, Practice Area Leader, Business Analytics and Optimization, 
Adam A. Hameed
