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?

DIY - at your peril

DIY – at your peril

‘A fine example of 21^st Century Windbaggery’ ‘Merely a stable which will accept any hobbyhorse’ Very well known for not knowing what it does’

These are just some examples from a squabble this week in a Royal Society and Charity about direction, a breakdown between members and staff and oh yes, the value of Research.

This Society protested it had consulted members through an annual survey, but they committed the venal sin of doing it themselves – the Research was not conducted independently and thereby raised as many problems as it had planned to settle. There have been allegations of suppressed data, poor expression and particular analysis aimed to give prominence to convenient viewpoints.

I know, I know, that Research tools available on the internet can give the illusion of power and impartiality and appear to ‘magic up’ sound quantitative methods.

But don’t do it yourself – if it were a house you might trust yourself with shelves but you’d be a fool to go down the DIY route with complex electrics or  an extension – and even then, your work would be independently assessed to ensure compliance.

So whatever Research you are contemplating, outsource to a Research Agency you can trust - don’t do it yourself.

Jonathan Brill

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)