Author: John Sammarco

From his vantage point as someone who evolved from a collector of enormous amounts of data to a wise decision-maker at high levels of business and government, few are more qualified than Vince Barabba to offer guidance on how to bridge the chasm that usually separates big data and wise decisions.

Many companies are grappling with how to leverage the opportunities arising from big data. But, there’s nothing new about exponential technology change and the accelerating ability to capture enormous amounts of data. And, there’s a lot to learn from earlier pioneers about how to tackle this challenge.

You can be innovative and still get steamrolled as layers of internal management turn your creative ideas into something unrecognizable.

For the dogs, sneezing “is a form of communication,” says study co-author Reena Walker, who performed the research as a student at Brown University and a research technician at the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust. “The sneeze acts as some kind of signal that shapes decision-making.”

Amazon may be an enormous corporation, but their core tools are simple and quite usable. Here is what we can steal.

Will machine prediction decrease or increase the amount of work available for humans in decision-making? It is too early to tell.

When you get a more inclusive group decision-making process, you get a better answer because there are more ideas on the table. If we want a better future, we’re going to need a more varied workforce.”

Beware of the HiPPO in the room. When a HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) is in play, your organization is most likely not relying on data to inform decision-making. In fact, I believe the HiPPO effect is one of the biggest barriers to more evidence-based and data-driven decision-making. With the quantity and quality of data available today, it is just poor business for organizations to ignore data in favor of making decisions solely based on what the HiPPO wants done.

Getting strategy done well often calls for trade-offs between delivering short-term results and implementing foundational changes that require time. Yet companies that can achieve a balance between opposing forces are far more likely to realize successful strategies that endure.

A common approach when starting an analytics project is to ask what questions you would like the analysis to answer. But if your goal is to drive actionable analytics that monetize your data, you need to start at a different point.