Data Specialists in two cities

 A pall of smoke hung over Princes Street Gardens in the Centre of Edinburgh.

‘That’ll be the smoke from the one o’clock cannon,’ explained a native Edinburgh chap to his companion. ‘It goes off every day at one o’clock.’

‘It’s only ten to one’ , his friend  pointed out.

So our native Edinburgher had to respond. What do most people do when the information they are sure is accurate, is not? They feel they have been caught out, the data is inaccurate and they clutch at pet phrases or idioms. They bluster.

‘I’m entitled to my opinion’, he blustered on.  Like the moon is made of green cheese or the earth is flat. Does an ‘opinion’ really mean believing something to be true, which verifiably is not?

In London, at the opposite end of the importance of data scale, I encountered  one of these life changing ‘Aha!’ moments. The chap, peering at a complex data set, pushed his glasses up on to his forehead and said ‘Aha, this is not AF. It’s a history of episodes of SVT.’

This is the world of identifying heart problems and their treatment.

Our chap read a set of data produced by a machine which recorded heart beats and was saying ‘this is not a pattern of irregular and very fast heart beats, merely a pattern of very fast heart beats.’

Important – Oh yes! and directly contradicting the ‘opinion’ of a previous expert.

Another case of ‘everyone’s entitled to their opinion?’

Oh no! – this is a failure by one professional to read a set of data properly, the consequence being a wrong diagnosis and a wrong treatment plan.

Nothing wrong with the data collection, nothing wrong with data presentation – a lot wrong with data interpretation. There are professionals and then there are specialists – often a specialist makes the genuine difference.

Are either of these case studies transferable to your company or organisation?

Duty of Care

 Care Quality Omission -the cartoon in today’s Times – NHS scandal watchdogs ‘should face prosecution’ shouts the front page headline - NHS patients need to be given more power states the leader column.

Adroit-e has been arguing for some years that patients’ insights should be given increased prominence in policy making – but why restrict things to NHS patients?

Many people go to the dentist privately – some practices operate a 2 tier NHS/Private system. Adroit-e has approached dental groups with a plan to operate a rigorous feed back system.

The culture in London NHS hospitals has been described to Adroit-e by leading NHS managers as one where bullying consultants run departments as personal fiefdoms. We responded by developing a plan to train student doctors in conducting feedback research with patients – a small step in improving the role of patients in identifying  an antipathetic culture.

We have consulted with doctors’ surgeries to produce a less anodyne and uneven feedback structure for their patients, than the ones currently in place.

Similarly, we have constructed rigorous feedback systems for those concerned with the care of the elderly, a related structure to the one in today’s headlines but no stranger to recent charges  of systemic malfunction.

None of these feedback programmes is currently in operation – in the hands of managers of these services they have either withered on the grapevine or failed to see the light of day.

It’s part of the same set of circumstances – the truth is something to be avoided at all costs in case it interferes with the smooth running of the business.

Come on guys – you can do better than this!

Some industries are benefitting from “Big Data” more than others

I have suggested previously that the move from the Information Age to  the Analytics Age has still to be acknowledged by many companies. Put simply, too many have collected information and don’t understand what they’ve collected.

These findings below suggest that even if they understand it, there’s still a vast gulf separating them from putting their findings into action.

‘To assemble an accurate portrait of consumer behavior is highly complex, and possibly the biggest challenge in marketing today. Companies must overcome hurdles not only limited to the technological difficulty of collecting disparate data sets from traditional and digital platforms. 

In a digital age in which most customer interactions are in some way measurable, two-thirds of companies surveyed worldwide by Capgemini in February described themselves as “data driven,” suggesting that most business executives recognize the value of data in improving operational success.

But with the exception of budgeting and planning, most executives surveyed by McKinsey & Company in April indicated a sizeable gap in their use of “Big Data.”

Such a gap is not altogether surprising given the vast range of data that different company functions can collect. Similarly, the potential benefits that accrue from the analysis of the collected data and the reformulation of strategy based on that analysis will vary from industry to industry and company to company.

It is clear that industries of all types will need to get better at collecting, analyzing and using the information they compile. Almost all the executives in North America polled by Oracle in April agreed that improvements to information gathering and analysis practices would be necessary over the next two years.

The largest group, 43%, thought the most needed refinement lay in the ability to turn information into actionable insight. The next highest priority was a tie between heightening the accuracy of gathered information, and enhancing training in analyzing data.

Getting good data and then being able to turn it into something of value will require the ongoing dedication of attention and resources in order for marketers to benefit. Neither is Legitimate concerns about deriving ROI from Big Data persist’

Only by harnessing the powerful trinity of Collection -  Analysis – Action will the ROI be justified.

Jonathan Brill

(Commenting on Views appearing in Market Research World)