"analyzing pertinent data and helping inform employee decision-making"

Que dados são usados pela sua empresa para tomar decisões?

Que esforços são feitos para assegurar a qualidade desses dados?

Com que frequência são analisados?

"many leaders use past exceptions as justification to ignore the cost of failure. Reasons for this may vary — from a distrust of analytics to a desire to succeed with a bold, unconventional move — but it can prove costly in the long-run.
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An illustration of this is professional gambling. Casinos thrive because many bettors believe they are smarter than the odds, and that they can beat the house with bold betting. These are the gamblers who drive the majority of casinos’ profits.
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When relying on prior experience, consider that memory is inconsistent and fallible. We are more likely to recall extremely unexpected events, rather than more mundane occurrences, thanks to “flashbulb memory.”
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In a business context, flashbulb memory causes people to remember exceptional results, rather than expected outcomes. For example, an executive may vividly remember taking a chance on an unconventional hire and watching that employee grow into a star performer. They are less likely to remember when they made a safer bet on an obviously qualified candidate who turned out to be exactly as competent as expected, or the risky hires that did not work out. The exception becomes the legend.
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There’s a huge difference between understanding the importance of data and making it a priority in your organization. Every business needs experts responsible for analyzing pertinent data and helping inform employee decision-making.
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Instinct still has a place in business, but it should not be the only driver of decision-making. By making data and BI a focal point of your team’s strategic thinking, and using it to craft smart organizational policies, leaders can safeguard their businesses against unnecessary failure, and ensure that the company makes more good decisions than bad."

Trechos retirados de "Are You Using Your Data, or Just Collecting It?"

A informação é preciosa

A propósito de "Chatting With the Spanish Wine Diva":
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"What advice would you give to winemakers in lesser-known markets today?
The U.S. wine consumer is generally curious, restless and always looking for something new. High quality wines combined with clear packaging design, a flavor profile that is approachable, and a compelling story (which so many wineries have), can go a long way in helping sell wine."
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Recordo estas palavras:
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"Companies have traditionally been interested in how customers view them and their products. The greater share of a customer's mind that a company can win, the greater the likelihood that the customer will buy products from that company.
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The customer usually looks for rational reasons (Moi ici: Eu escreveria, o cliente procura desculpas em vez de razões e, acrescentaria, razões racionais para ele e, eventualmente irracionais para outros) for making a purchase, and finding these reasons is only possible when the customer has enough information about the company and the relationship it is offering."
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Não é publicidade tout court. É informação, é conhecimento, é matéria-prima para sonhar, para arquitectar experiências.
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"Knowledge enables the customer to fully benefit from the products or services he has received. Knowledge can significantly increase the value of a relationship in cases where products are complex.
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The problem with complex products and services is that often the customer lacks information about provider competencies. (Moi ici: Acontece tantas vezes. De que vale o supermercado ter quinoa na prateleira se os clientes não a sabem cozinhar?) The customer, in other words, has not received sufficiently clear information to benefit from the relationship and all of its potential. Companies should make information more readily available to customers about how to act as effectively as possible in a relationship and truly benefit from the company's competence."
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Trechos retirados do livro "Customer Relationship Management" de Kaj Storbacka e Jarmo Lehtinen.

Informação, só informação

Aumentar o consumo de algo que faz bem à saúde, aumentar as vendas de algo que faz bem à saúde, modificar comportamentos, à base ... informação colocada em pontos estratégicos. Por exemplo, na montra da loja, na banca da fruta, ...

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"Stairway to motivational heaven"

A poluição da informação

Dois postais que me deixaram a pensar:
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"The Pollution of Information" no blogue Economist's View e "Japan’s butter saga: The government steps in" no blogue 26econ.com
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Comecemos pelo último: "After a three-month shortage, you’d think that butter prices would rise, and supply would increase. Instead the government has to force producers to increase output. Like I said before, there’s plenty of milk on supermarket shelves. Why is it necessary for the government to order firms to reallocate production toward butter? It seems that something is going wrong in the market (some kind of market failure), although I don’t really know what the basic problem is. "

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Para quem não sabe, o mercado agro-alimentar japonês é muito ineficiente. O governo japonês, para proteger a sua agricultura e auto-subsistência alimentar tem uma paranóia... basta comparar o rendimento por hectare das culturas agrícolas japoneses e tailandesas, por exemplo.

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Abordemos agora o primeiro postal:

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"The first case of information pollution is in the price system. This is something which is familiar to economists, though not under this name. The price system, however, is an information system in the sense that it tells people what to do that pays off for them. If the price system fails to reflect the realities of what economists call the system of alternative costs, it is likely to produce false decisions. "

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"A second source of information pollution results from the development of large scale organizations and the inevitable hierarchy which results. A hierarchy pollutes information, again because of a kind of distortion of the payoffs. A person rises in a hierarchy by pleasing his superior. He frequently pleases his superior by telling him what that superior wants to hear. Even at the subconscious level, therefore, there is a constant tendency for hierarchy to corrupt communications, and for necessary information to be filtered out before it reaches the top decision makers. The bigger the organization, the more likely are its top decision makers to be living in a wholly imaginary world."

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"The third form of information pollution might be described as the problem of saliency. All human beings suffer from some kind of information overload, and under these circumstances it is the dramatic and salient information which breaks through the barriers that we all set up against information input. Hence our images of the world are perverted in the direction of the dramatic and away from those things which happen to be true and important but are not dramatic"

Informação vs sentido

Ontem, no final de uma reunião comentaram o facto do nosso blogue disponibilizar muita informação, o que não será muito comum.

Depois, meti-me no carro e dirigi-me a Vizela, uma localidade no norte do país. Enquanto trocava o almoço por uma sandes descansava, lendo mais um pouco do livro "Presentation Zen" de Garr Reynolds.

Foi então que dei de caras com este trecho:
"People who possess loads of information in a particular field have historically been in hot demand and able to charge high fees for access to their stuffed, fact-filled brains. This was so because the facts used to be difficult to access.
Not any more. In an era where information about seemingly anything is only a mouse click away, just possessing information alone is hardly the differentiator it used to be. What is more important to day than ever before is the ability to synthesize the facts and give them context and perspective. Picasso once said that "computers are useless for they can only give answers." Computers and Google can indeed give us the routine information and facts that we neeed.
What we want from people who stand before us and give a talk is to give us that which data and information alone cannot: meaning."

Vizela impressionou-me... fábricas abandonadas, ervas altas e secas a invadirem o que foram jardins fabris, monumentos a comemorar os 20, ou 30, ou 40 anos de empresas que já não têm alma. Impressionante!

Qual a finalidade? Qual o propósito? Para que existe?

Segundo o JN de hoje:

"Em alguns casos com quase um ano de atraso, o centro de estudos da Segurança Social entrou, esta semana, num frenesim de informação. A Direcção-Geral de Estudos, Estatística e Planeamento (DGEEP) publicou relatórios há muito aguardados, como o relativo a acidentes de trabalho de 2002, às greves ocorridas no último trimestre de 2005 ou aos quadros de pessoal, de 2003 e de 2004."

Se não fosse o dinheiro dos contribuintes a ser desperdiçado e torrado, até que esta era uma boa anedota.

Se alguém na DGEEP com galões, procurasse começar pelo fim, responderia às perguntas feitas acima.
Ao responder a essas perguntas... de certeza que apareceria "a produção atempada de informação".