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Don't Judge Subjectivly - Be Data Driven

By Alan Gillies

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 08Apr2009 Word count: 449 Viewed: 198 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

A never ending flow of reports detailed with colourful charts, graphs and oodles of digits is the first thing that comes to mind as soon as we hear the word "Data". Its importance can neither be denied nor misunderstood. This is because 'management is a science as well as an art', and data is what drives every logical and scientific basis toward findings and information.

With each passing day, organizational databases are increasing in number and capacity, and in this situation, the key lies in the efficient management of this data. This combination has led to the widespread use of concepts like data mining and warehousing. Data mining effectively utilises stored information for the purpose of discovering useful associations in hidden patterns and trends, continuously exploring new ways of making all this data a useful asset rather than merely a liability.

The immediate advantage of this approach is the elimination of subjectivity from our information related decisions. This is because we cannot ignore the clear indications from figures. Too much emphasis on these facts and figures can lead to a loss of departmental coherence, causing an organization to break down, however, a cautious usage of this information can bring about extraordinary gains. The pursuit of any cautious method requires that the data is unbiased, statistically accurate, precise, complete, current, non-redundant, and credible in the required framework.

A Data based approach eliminates stereotyping and pre-conceived notions, filtering out the not-so-useful practices from the viable ones. Facts and figures lead to objective judgement - without leaving any room for prejudice. This "Technical Analysis" method uses past figures to predict the future ones, and having been widely recognized as a valuable system in the stock markets, Forex and the commodities markets, it's used today for predicting the probable volume of trading and share price by using past archived values.

The same principle can be very insightful in any judgement of human performance. As we all often find, first impressions are not always the correct impressions. There are often cases where an individual doesn't seem to be useful or productive, but then surprisingly, performs better than the rest. Or in another instance, there may be a situation where someone who is spoken of very highly by others, fails miserably when it comes to actual performance. Here we can see that subjective impressions - unlike the accuracy and reliability of performance data, can often fail to yield any sort of consistently expected results.

In conclusion, a data based approach is definitely better than any form of subjective consideration as the former eliminates any unfounded beliefs which were formed without reason, and it does - so to speak, 'hit the nail right on the head'.

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