left-brain. The cultural change we seek
is to be both left- and right-brain.
DENYING THE SERENDIPITY OF
STATISTICS
Before purchasing expensive data
or executing a sophisticated analysis, you should plan how you are going to use this information or how you
are going to analyze a business problem. Having a plan makes sense – just
not perfect sense. No one sat down
and wrote a detailed plan for the discovery of penicillin. It was a complete
accident. Many great discoveries happen by chance. Holding a data request
up to the standards of a mathematical
proof is a bit much. This is a chronic
breakdown point and the site of many
a discombobulation. In an analyticsdriven culture, it should be sufficient
for a plan to entail what you expect and
emphasize the economics of the possible exploratory work. We may need to
make numerous attempts on our way to
success.
Finally and foremost, we must resist
the temptation of allowing people to present other peoples’ analytics work. This
delays acclimation and creates a deceptive culture. At a number of corporations,
this is the standard. No one below a certain rank is given the privilege of presenting to senior management, and the token
A NA L Y T I C S
few qualified analytics professionals will
always be below that rank – whatever it
takes. This senior management intends
to stay insulated in the “executive management bubble,” all right-brain.
Randy Bartlett (Randy.Bartlett@
BlueSigmaAnalytics.com), Ph.D., is a business
analytics/big data leader with Blue Sigma Analytics.
He has more than 20 years of experience,
which includes leading and organizing analytics
resources, reviewing advanced analytics results
and providing advancements in business analytics.
Bartlett delivers presentations and writes about
business analytics, including the article “The
Business Analytics Revolution,” co-authored
with Girish Malik, that appeared in the May/June
2013 issue of Analytics magazine. Bartlett is
also the author of a book, “A Practitioner’s Guide
to Business Analytics,” from which this article
was adapted. Reprinted with permission from
McGraw-Hill Professional. Bartlett is a member of
INFORMS.
NOTES & REFERENCES
1. It is an amazing feat to write a book about a naval
battle and tie the outcome to a cultural characteristic.
See “Midway: The Battle That Doomed Japan” by
Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya (1955).
2. “Competing on Analytics: The New Science Of
Winning,” “Analytics At Work: Smarter Decisions,
Better Results,” “Data Driven: Profiting from Your
Most Important Business Asset,” and “Super
Crunchers: Why Thinking-by-Numbers Is the New
Way to Be Smart,” among others, have made it
clear that analytics is too understated in the blend.
3. This is the right-brainers saying they cannot
be bothered to think in a left-brain manner for a
single moment.
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