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).”

Change = WIIFM > WMETP

May 08, 2013 by Jim Harris

My previous post about change management, which advocated nudges not mandates, received an excellent comment from Karen Way: “What I’ve found that works to nudge people into accepting data quality as part of their norm is to demonstrate the benefit to them, the WIIFM (what’s in it for me) factor. This is especially true…

Bursting Your Filter Bubble

Apr 24, 2013 by Jim Harris

In a previous post about data visualization, I discussed how our expectations can distort the data we visualize a lot more than we may realize, causing us to mistake dashboards for magic mirrors reflecting back our own image of what we want our data to show us.

Use a No Brown M&M’s Clause

Apr 17, 2013 by Jim Harris

There is a popular story about David Lee Roth exemplifying the insane demands of a power-mad celebrity by insisting that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band.

Don’t Mess with Data

Apr 03, 2013 by Jim Harris

In Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein recounted the story of the campaign to reduce littering on Texas highways called Don’t Mess with Texas.  Prior to launching it, Texas officials were enormously frustrated by the failure of their previous, well-funded, and highly publicized advertising campaigns, which attempted to convince people that it was their civic duty to stop littering.

Do the Eyes Have It?

Feb 27, 2013 by Jim Harris

In my previous post, I looked into the magic mirrors of business leaders, more commonly called dashboards, as one example of how data visualization is used.  In this post, I want to look at what we use to look — our eyes — and how they process whatever data we visualize.

Mirror, Mirror on the Data

Feb 20, 2013 by Jim Harris

As Beth Schultz recently blogged, Data Visualizations Beg Your Attention.  And as Noreen Seebacher recently blogged, A Picture Explains a Lot of Data.

Although I agree with both concepts, and I recommend reading more than just the titles of those posts, I couldn’t help but wonder if what should be begging more of our attention is…

Stop Tapping and Start Talking

Feb 13, 2013 by Jim Harris

In my previous post, I pondered how the inevitable lag time between the definition of requirements and the delivery of solutions is exacerbated by the business world fluctuating dramatically in short periods of time.  Today’s business requirements may not only be different than yesterday’s business requirements, but today’s business requirements might be different before we even get to tomorrow.

Requirements Flux

Feb 06, 2013 by Jim Harris

As Steve Jobs once said:

“You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them.  By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

The inevitable lag time between the definition of requirements and the delivery of solutions is perhaps the primary reason for the perpetual strife between the Business and IT.  I have…