by Angela Guess
Forbes contributor Brent Dykes recently wrote, “New York businessman and GOP candidate Donald Trump recently stated he felt the contributions that data made to Obama’s successful presidential campaigns were overrated. Meanwhile, it’s reported that Hillary Clinton is assembling a data team that will be three times larger than Obama’s impressive 2012 operation. Clearly, the two presidential candidates value data very differently, and we’ll find out in November who made the right decision. Despite the increasing investments that companies have made in analytics tools, many people still align more with Trump’s sentiment and don’t want to rely too heavily on data. For example, while analytics was in the top three spending categories for US banks, only 20% of banking executives wanted their organizations to be highly data-driven. For some individuals, it can be unnerving to trust data that is difficult to fully understand or which doesn’t align naturally with their intuition.”
Dykes goes on, “Frequently, this fear leads people to incessantly question the validity of their data. Many business owners and managers are nervous that erroneous or incomplete data will lead to bad business decisions. For example, film manufacturer Kodak forecasted in the late 1990s there would only be 400,000 digital cameras on the market (outside of Japan)—however, the estimate ended up being off by over 4 million units. A more accurate estimate might have helped Kodak to better anticipate the growth of digital photography and chart a different course where it could have avoided Chapter 11 bankruptcy.”
He continues, “A healthy dose of skepticism is sometimes necessary when it comes to your company’s data. It is never going to be perfect and is most likely peppered with various discrepancies… However, why don’t we also see a healthy distrust of business assumptions? Why is there no such thing as assumptions governance? You may have heard the great quote attributed to Mark Twain, ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.’”
Photo credit: Flickr