IS THERE MINDLESS DATA OBSESSION?

Is your organization suffering from data intoxication? Are there more and more data collectors and analysts in your company than people who actually do valuable work to help bring revenue?

"An obsession with metrics without qualitative alignment tends to create more confusion than clarity,"  writes Peter Follows in a Forbes article. “With the right mindset and appropriate processes in place, data can take its rightful place as an important linchpin between strategic planning and effective management.”

Data is essential to effectively run an organization. However, in the last decade, probably due to the spell of tech vendors, every other company is obsessed with hoarding consumer data. We now live in an age, where investments in the product or the service take a backseat at many orgs in search of perfect data and analytics. 

One cannot have a conversation with any department, including HR, without looking at some analytics, survey or chart, because it seems to make people feel smarter. Employees and management find it difficult to grasp complex qualitative insights or conversation without confirming their biases on a spreadsheet or chart.

Rory Sutherland points to this absurdity of what he calls box tickers and pencil pushers in his article on The Spectator . Resources are poured into multi-year data collection projects without any real accountability; while teams who produce, promote, or sell the products and services are underfunded, and held to much higher standards.

Massive amounts of data collection are generally not intended to benefit consumers and hardworking employees. Typically, the goals are to extract more without increasing quality for consumers or investing in personnel.

Unless there's bigger shift in the purpose of economic activity, businesses will be driven by scarcity perspective and over index on data extraction only to benefit a few. The obsession with hoarding consumer data is a reflection of a very narrow fiscal understanding of profit. Everything, every engagement and everyone becomes just a data point with dollar sign!

There are wonderful executives and business leaders who with collaboration can re-shift the focus of business industry towards improving overall good and wellbeing of all stakeholders - customers, vendors, employees, and communities.

Do you mind sharing some ideas to reduce data hoarding obsession at companies?

Ehsaan Way aims to bring beneficent excellence in business, leadership, communities and economy through thoughtful brand growth strategies and Certification programs.