Newsroom

March 2010: Are you driving data or is data driving you?

There is a ton of data available to every business; extracting information and further analyzing the results is a major challenge.

Organizations are spending huge amounts of time through the utilization of employees to create and manage their own analytics. The process of using these employee driven analytics brings up several main issues.

• The same data is often extracted many times, by many different people, to create very similar analytics – thereby unnecessarily duplicating effort and fostering errors.
• Results are often different based on how or when the data was extracted.
• Based on differing agendas, analytics are often skewed to produce a desired result rather than the actual one.

Pat Moynihan once stated – “You’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts”, reflecting the reality of the issues raised above. If organizations could understand what information is being used to run the business –and then make that data commonly available to all information consumers, they would reduce the cost and time required to obtain and analyze information.

Review what people in your organization are required to do to produce all analytics and performance measures. If more time is being spent creating the analytics than reviewing the results, it is time for a change.

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