Data for business ?

2005-08-25T23:40:00.000-07:00

Its quite astonishing to see how many of the biggest business decisions made are based on "hunch" or more often what is called an "executive hunches". A lot of the business decisions can be based on data.
The problem starts with businesses not thinking about data collection & analysis actively as part of the business process.
You can only optimize, what you measure.

If, as a business we want to become more profitable, we need to know exactly where our sales are coming from, how much are we spending for each of your various expenses, which customers are most profitable, which are most loyal, how are the sales & expenses & loyalty of customers, & employees changing. These tell us - What to worry about ?

So far we have been speaking of business very generally, in fact whatever has been said above about businesses holds for all processes. eg. If you want to give raises to your employees, you want to base the hike on performance - to keep the best performers & let the non-performers know that they need to ramp up. To decide which grade an employee falls in, you could use your gut feel or collect data about the performace of all employees on various metrics every month & at the end of the year use those to decide who gets what.

Evaluating the worth of an employee is probably the toughest of jobs (no wonder people managers get paid as if they were creating a rocket).

Most other business tasks are much simpler to quantify, evaluate & hence optimize.

Using data for improving business

Data for business ?