What is preventing organisations from being more data-driven, why is this occurring and how to address these challenges

1. Claiming Credit for
being Data-driven
Alban Gérôme
@albangerome
MeasureCamp San Francisco
28 July 2018

3. We need to become a data-driven company,
so we bought this data analytics tool and you
will have access to it and your reports too
@albangerome

5. Here’s what I need you to do…
• Dig into the data analytics reports
• Look for actionable insights and recommendations
• Send the C-suite a daily report at 8am every morning
Trust me, it’s pretty easy!
@albangerome

7. But I am sure I did it right!
• Lack of training or being thrown at the deep end with the data
analytics results in people extracting what they think is the same
report
• This often results in discrepancies with the data, everybody thinks
they extracted the data right and the other colleague has not
• Eventually the C-suite must create an analytics team to have a single
version of the truth
@albangerome

9. Ah, you are our Head of Analytics
Robert
Actually Dr Robert H.
• 30 years’ experience in his
field
• The C-suite just told him
that his team must become
more data-driven
• Sees the Analytics team as
just a support team
Jess
Actually Jessica
• Was a business analyst at a
Big Four consultancy for the
past 3 years, straight out of
Business School
• The C-suite has hired her to
help the organisation
become data-driven
• Sees the incumbent teams
as stuck in the past
@albangerome

10. 6 months later…
@albangerome

11. Let the Battle for Credit begin!
Dr Robert H. et al.
• Ask for a lot of data
• Seek to find actionable data
all by themselves
• Tend to cherry-pick the data
that confirms the same old
ideas and beliefs as before
• Discard the rest of the data
as unreliable or just noise
Jessica and her team
• Find actionable insights
which no team wants to
implement somehow
• Produces many daily,
weekly and monthly reports
• Monitors for reporting
outages caused by IT
• Extracts loads of data
@albangerome

13. Add one fresh egg
• In 1952, Betty Crocker launched their first cake mixes but they didn’t
sell well
• Dr Burleigh Gardner and Dr Ernest Dichter suggested: remove the
powdered eggs from the cake mix and print “add one egg” on the box
• The Betty Crocker cake mixes started selling a lot better and people
started spending more time decorating their cakes!
@albangerome

15. People don’t trust algorithms
“Algorithms beat humans in many domains – in
fact, in most of the domains that have been
tested… but people still aren’t using them”
Berkeley J. Dietvorst, Assistant Professor of
Marketing at Booth University, Chicago
@albangerome

16. Forecasting experiment :
Algorithms vs Humans
Option 1
Participants can
make their forecast
Option 2
Participants can
choose the
algorithms’ forecast
as-is but all
participants rejected
that option
Option 3
Participants who had
that option were
significantly more
likely to use it: take
the algorithms’
forecast and tweak it
The participants are told that most of the time algorithms will beat them
but sometimes the algorithms make mistakes, they can be beaten too
@albangerome

17. People do not want to rely on processes
and people if they can’t add one fresh
egg of their own and take some of the
credit. Trust might just be nothing more
than a convenient excuse
@albangerome

19. “My Way” is a famous
Frank Sinatra song,
perhaps his most famous
one
Paul Anka, also a singer,
adapted the lyrics of “My
Way” from
A song by Claude
François, “Comme
d’habitude”
@albangerome

20. Full credit for the
interpretation
Full credit for the lyrics Full credit for the melody
@albangerome

21. Frank Sinatra, Paul Anka and Claude François all
get the credit for making “My Way” such a great
song….
but so does everybody who has covered the song,
even the Sex Pistols
@albangerome

23. What a great team we make!
Call me Robert!
• By starting with business
questions, I provide a steer
to the analytics team
• My 30 years of experience
are still valued
• I get full credit for that steer
and domain knowledge
Call me Jess!
• We can focus on what data
we need to answer the
business questions
• We do little reporting and
monitoring now
• My team and I take full
credit for our data analysis
skills
@albangerome

25. Conclusion
• Bombarding the analytics team with huge data extracts only to
cherry-pick the 1% that confirms prior beliefs is being data-justified
and wasteful
• Providing actionable insight without regard for the years of
experience of the incumbent team’s may be data-driven but it looks
like conservatorship too
• The ultimate goal is a data-informed organisation, a symbiosis of the
domain knowledge and data analysis
@albangerome

26. The credit for becoming a more
data-driven organisation is for no
specific team or person to claim
Only the organisation as a whole
can make that claim
@albangerome

27. Thank you very much!
http://www.albangerome.com
@albangerome