No fairy dust required
How businesses look for magic in data while ignoring the obvious
As magical as data may seem — whether it’s big data, little data, AI data, or just Excel — its magic still isn’t strong enough to fix just plain stupid.
Veteran data management consultant Evan Levy often finds a common mistake among business people: They assume that data is the fairy dust that reveals secrets.
“People think that if they’ve got advanced analytics,” Evan says, “I’ve got artificial intelligence, I've got machine learning, it’ll go find a solution to the problem.” Business people often fail to focus on the business problem first — and only then determine if they've got the data for it.
“They always do it ass backwards,” he says. “[They say,] here's this data. Let's go, let's go, let's get into analytics.’”
This is one of the most common flaws he sees when he engages with clients. He asks them if they can identify the problem to solve? Can they identify the problem’s owner? Do they have the authority to act? Do you have data to identify the solution to the problem? “As funny as that sounds, all too often that is not the case.” They haven’t identified the problem, they don’t know who owns the problem, they lack authority to act, and they don't have the right data.
Exhibit A is the Reno-area casino that hired Evan to consult on a dramatic drop in visitors. Management had been poring over the numbers. Then they hired a Russian scientist. “He looked at traffic patterns, he looked at the weather, he looked at socioeconomic details, current events, economic circumstances. And he concocted all of these reasons why the numbers had dropped, and why they would continue to drop.”
What the Russian had not looked at was the promotion budget. There as if by magic was the answer: The casino had stopped mailing promotions.
“The direct targeted marketing had been pretty much whacked,” Evan says. “It had nothing to do with the weather, the gasoline, socio-economic circumstances, or local competing events.”
“Casinos are cheap,” he says. Management figured that when they build a resort, people will just come. “They didn’t have the marketing and promotional skills.” Without those skills, they lacked even the weak magic it took to attract sufficient crowds.
“If I'm a magician,” he says, “do I have the right hat to reach in and grab the rabbit? It's not simply any schmuck who can take a hat and pull a rabbit out.”
As in most other organizations today, the casino had all kinds of data yet failed to see the obvious. They simply hadn’t done the basic analysis correctly.
Not every problem requires advanced analytics. Sometimes it's simple stuff.
Thanks Ted..that makes perfect sense!