Are You About to Bump into a Data Iceberg?

A lot of unmeasured experience may be hiding from view.

We all, at one point or another, have known that sinking feeling of having missed the bigger picture. The worst times are when we’ve put a lot of effort, time, and analyst hours into a business decision that turned out to be missing a lot of important information.

Sometimes it can be revealed to us either by our manager, or a colleague, who will say out loud in the middle of a meeting:

“I don’t recognize these numbers you’ve got here.”

The bigger the data set, the more effort involved, and the more important the decision all add up to a bigger cost of hitting the skids. We all know the importance of what we tend to call sanity checks. But, how do you create a discipline for:

• Catching missing data at the data measurement and gathering stages, versus the analysis stage?
• Helping you think about what could be missing?

Three Easily Remembered Questions

Having a complete set of data doesn’t mean just the entire file. It really means the entire measurable experience that matters. To illustrate that, our measurable experience can be simplified down to three basic questions: what are the…