What’s big and stops silly decisions?
Sounds like the start of a bad joke but in fact it could be the start of positive change within your business.
Just take a moment to think about the decisions that are made in your organization, often these are made as judgment calls rather than based on the facts. Like making decisions based on the financial results from the last quarter, or worse still selling to customers when their accounts are in default. In fact one presenter at the IBM Solutions Connect conference described it as being like ‘trying to smell your way to your chair!’.
You have so much information at hand but little is actually used. In fact you may have used more data points to choose which restaurant you last ate at than the last commercial work decision you made (you checked the location suitability on your map app, read UrbanSpoon, asked friends, checked the menu on their website, recalled any previous experience there and so on).
The increase in information we have is mind-blowing; an organization now produces the same volume of data in two days as it would have over the course of a whole year ten years ago! This makes data our new natural resource – but you will need to refine it to make something useful!
As a leader within your business big data can be refined to support
- Talent retention
- Workforce planning
- Productivity improvements
- Safety
For example a zoo in the US uses big data to roster their staff. Weather reports are combined with data on school holiday, public holiday and weekend dates to produce predicted visitor numbers. The zoo has so far managed to reduce staff costs by 65%!
Another example is the Warratahs rugby club. The players wear tags that record 250 data items including fatigue levels, speed, duration and intensity of activity, to predict player injuries. This has lead to a $800,000 saving in medical bills and a 20% improvement in player availability. If you employ workers in high-risk roles how can you afford not to explore these tools?
The moral of the story is that judgment calls may have got you to where you are today but to stay there, or even progress, ‘predict and act’ is a better ‘modus operandi’ and big data is the perfect partner to help you accomplish this.
About Pauline Tarrant:
Pauline has a passion for people performance and spent her entire working life helping organisations, teams and individuals perform at their best. Her expertise in the HR technology space enables Pauline Tarrant Consulting to operate as a trusted partner to the HR team to explore how to get the best from existing technology and explore new solutions that offer best-fit improvements to their business.
