6 Questions to Ask For Real Insight

LEADERSHIP | 5/18/2012 @ 8:28上午

Numbers, numbers everywhere but which ones really matter to your business? With a dizzying variety of business metrics and the increasing volume of social media numbers to track, how do you choose which ones are relevant?

Which will help you make better business decisions?

Prior to 2011 analytics was often treated as an add-on.  It is now front and center.  Sure, many companies cared about numbers in the form of dashboards and balanced scorecards, falling into the trap of the ‘squiggly line’ syndrome (i.e. focusing on small slices of a longer line of data and reacting incorrectly in knee jerk fashion). Now it has flipped 180 degrees where people are looking to data and modeling to help navigate the business. Experience teaches us the extremes are never the answer.

Progressive firms use big data to narrow their decision set not expect an answer.  They have figure out how to map the real-time information against historical information to offer predictive possibilities. The modern crystal ball is thus unveiled and companies await the next prediction.

This shift was evident at the annual Mobile World Congress (MWC) show in Barcelona where discussion centered on anticipated customer behavior in the mobile and content industries. At MWC 2012, analytics as a category was less pronounced than prior years but in many ways more prevalent. Tools to measure customer sentiment are starting to be embedded in solutions rather than offered as a bolt on capability. Similarly at the IBM Impact Conference in May, the focus was on how to extract insights from big data that is continuously flowing in from a variety of new sources. Finally, last week’s Sentiment Analysis Symposium focused on bridging technology and business through platforms that discover business value in opinions and attitudes in social media, news, and enterprise feedback.

Three very different conferences over the past three months all showcased amazing technology but still struggle to address the core business question of where do you start?

The key to addressing the Big Data phenomenon is to understand that the goal is not to capture enormous volumes of customer behavior, on-line chatter or market data (i.e. the “Big Data”). Rather the objective is to derive specific actionable insight from the Big Data. In other words, turn the Big Data into a much smaller pool of relevant answers and actions in real time if possible.

You still must ask a few questions up front to frame the discussion and then follow it through.

Determine the real business question. What issue will you clarify to truly move your business forward?
Understand that you or your organization may have bias towards the data. As an individual, will you take an analytic or creative view of the results? Will you and the stakeholders use the results discovered to inform or compel action in the organization?

Determine the best data to answer the essential question you are probing. Is it data at rest or data in motion or data in use? Is the data trustworthy? Is the data volatile and incomplete?
Collect the data via the best methods available to you factoring in social media tools, mobility and localization. Rather than trying to collect everything, seek just enough to get clear answers.
Harvest the insights. Beyond analysis this requires impartial investigation that goes beyond surface level inspection. Ensure the data is put in context against business issues that matter.
Determine recommendations based on the needs of the stakeholders. Take note if the recommendations mesh with your long term strategy or short term tactics.
The trick is to derive insights that answer necessary business questions while unfathomably large amounts of data are screaming past your business at tremendous speed. The good news is that solutions are available today and more are coming to get this done. Tooling alone can’t get you there. The challenge as always is to know what questions to ask to manage your business and expose the hidden insights.

What questions are you asking now for your business?

Paul Magnone is vice president of business development and strategic alliances at Openet Telecom, a global telecommunications software and consulting firm. He is the co-author of “Drinking from the Fire Hose: Making Smarter Decisions Without Drowning in Information” (Portfolio/Penguin, September 2011) and previously worked as a senior executive at IBM for 21 years where he started and grew four sales and consulting businesses.