The Decision Wobegon Effect

May 15, 2013 by Jim Harris

In his book The Most Human Human, Brian Christian discussed what Baba Shiv of the Stanford Graduate School of Business called the decision dilemma, “where there is no objectively best choice, where there are simply a number of subjective variables with trade-offs between them. The nature of the situation is such that additional information probably won’t even help. In these cases – consider the parable of the donkey that, halfway between two bales of hay and unable to decide which way to walk, starves to death – what we want, more than to be correct, is to be satisfied with our choice (and out of the dilemma).”

Decision-Making and the Invisible Information Chain

Apr 12, 2013 by Dylan Jones

Business leaders and managers at all levels within an organisation make hundreds of important decisions throughout the year and nearly all of them are driven by data.

This isn’t Jeopardy

Mar 20, 2013 by Jim Harris

Imagine a political debate between two candidates where one candidate answers every question quickly, beaming with confidence, and the other candidate answers every question slowly, and with less assertiveness in their response.

Big MetaData

Apr 12, 2012 by Phil Simon

Two years ago, I never even heard of Big Data. These days, it seems like I hear the term every day (although, admittedly, my antennae are now pretty attuned to that very phrase. It’s very much like platforms, but I digress.)

My, how times have changed.

WYSIWYG and WYSIATI

Feb 15, 2012 by Jim Harris

In his recent blog post about Big Data, one of the points made by Rob Armstrong was the important distinction between “looking at things” versus “looking for things” when it comes using data analysis to derive business insight.

Why Can’t We Predict the Weather?

Jan 18, 2012 by Jim Harris

In an edited excerpt of his new book, Too Big to Know, David Weinberger explained “Thomas Jefferson and George Washington recorded daily weather observations, but they didn’t record them hourly or by the minute.  Not only did they have other things to do, such data didn’t seem useful.  Even after the invention of the telegraph enabled the centralization of weather data, the 150 volunteers who received weather instruments from the Smithsonian Institution in 1849 still reported only once a day.”

Decision-Driven Data Management

Nov 30, 2011 by Jim Harris

Operational data quality refers to real-time or near-real-time, as opposed to batch-based, data quality processes that are incorporated directly into the business processes of the organization’s operational systems.

The Data that Supported the Decision

Nov 16, 2011 by Jim Harris

In the classic American Western film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which was adapted from a short story written by Dorothy Johnson, Liberty Valance (played by Lee Marvin) was an outlaw terrorizing the frontier town of Shinbone.

A Decision Needle in a Data Haystack

Nov 09, 2011 by Jim Harris

One of my favorite television shows is MythBusters on the Discovery Channel, starring Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, which uses elements of the scientific method to test the validity of various myths, such as whether modern technology could disprove that a needle in a haystack is a good metaphor for something that is difficult, if not impossible, to find.