5 Lessons On Making The Leap From Big Data To Wise Decision Making (Part 2 Of 2) Posted on : Oct 09 - 2017

From his vantage point as someone who evolved from a collector of enormous amounts of data to a wise decision-maker at high levels of business and government, few are more qualified than Vince Barabba to offer guidance on how to bridge the chasm that usually separates big data and wise decisions.

As I discussed in the first part of this series, Barabba’s new book, Wise Decision Making: Through the Systemic Use of Knowledge and Imagination (his sixth book), explores how all participants in a decision process can (and must) work better as a team. Success depends on not just great data but also on how well the enterprise coordinates its efforts to realize benefits that are greater than the sum of individual contributions.

Here are a few key lessons I drew from Wise Decision Making:

1.  Get behind the curtain.

Behind every enterprise are people who actually design and make things, and who ultimately translate market intelligence into products. These are the people who create value — everyone else just shuffles it around. When Barabba led market research at Kodak, it was the group of chemists and scientist who knew what could and could not be done with film chemistry. At General Motors, where he led strategy development, it was the engineers who could translate customer feedback into engineering design requirements. Who are the wizards behind the curtain in your organization?

If you’re in the business of collecting and leveraging data, make sure that you’re partnering directly with the scientists, engineers, designers and others who can use it. The enterprise needs data infused with their knowledge and imagination to improve products and services. Otherwise, the models built and the data collected might be worthless.

(This challenge is consistent with what Tom Warden, an expert on the use of big data in insurance, described to me as one of the biggest mistakes his industry: “too often, data scientists are clueless about how the business makes money.”)

2.  Understand the operating design of your enterprise.

Alan Kay’s dictum that “Context is worth 80 IQ points” is especially relevant for wise decision making. One of the most important dimensions of context is what Barabba calls the “operating design” of the enterprise. As depicted in the following figure, there are a range of possible operating designs. View More