Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Sometimes we get a bit carried away with this idea of being a data-centric organization or data centricity or data driven or whatever.

It seems that everyone wants a data-centric organization (and I don’t like that term because the computer marks it as a misspelled word). We need to have data centricity (another word marked as misspelled). We should base all decisions on data!

Wow. Cutting edge.

Not.

When I was a kid, my mother would drag my brothers and me to the grocery store. That was a necessity for her, not a choice. She would pick up one can of pork and beans. 39¢. She would pick up the next can of pork and beans with a different label on it. 49¢. She bought the 39¢ can based on data. She was running a data-centric family.

Now come the “yeah but.” That was a silly example. Yeah, but that was how it was. For a few years my mother was really data driven as she carried a little clicker that kept a running total cost of the what was in the grocery cart. Aha! Cumulative data.

My mother was far ahead of her time in this data stuff.

There are organizations out there that are run by the seat-of-the-pants or some other cliche meaning they feel their way through everything and never consider any numbers. Being in engineering, I have always worked with measurable quantities (6 volts, not 8 volts), calculations, and results.

Data can be important. It was important to my mother as she didn’t have much money. People have used data daily to decide which way to go. Data-driven decisions are not new. Let’s not get carried away with this as a new driver that drives us in some great direction.