Do you pride yourself on making data-driven decisions? Do you believe that you are a better leader because you adhere to the Baldrige Core Value and Concept of “Management by Fact?” Then maybe it’s time to ask yourself one of Dr. Harry Hertz’s* favorite questions, “How Do You Know?”
In a recently re-published Harvard Business Review Analytic Services Briefing Paper, Connecting the Data That Powers Real-Time, Value-Generating Insights, the authors cite an Enterprise Strategy Group study reporting, “Forty-four percent of organizations only somewhat trust the data given to end users for decision making.” That translates into nearly half of the organizations that require making critical decisions and evaluating risks don’t know whether their own data are accurate, timely, and high quality.
Enterprise management software, data analytics tools, and artificial intelligence (AI) all bring the promise of realizing value, but without the integration of reliable data sources in real-time we might just be enabling worse decisions in greater volume.
A key item in the Baldrige Excellence Framework§ is Item 4.2, “Information and Knowledge Management.” The first area to address is, “Data and Information,” broken into three overall level questions:
- (1)Quality How do you verify and ensure the quality of organizational data and information?
- (2)Availability How do you ensure the availability of organizational data and information?
- (3)Cybersecurity How do you secure sensitive or privileged data and information, information technology assets, and Internet-based systems?
These questions and the related multiple level questions might at first appear to be the purview of your Information Technology department, but they actually have connections reaching all the way back to the decision to select and track a particular metric.
- Does it have a documented operational definition that ensures it is calculated the same way consistently?
- Is the metric tracked manually, on spreadsheets, or in an automated fashion?
- Are new employees oriented with your data systems and security measures?
- Is refresher training given at regular intervals, and is individual coaching given if an audit detects errors in data entry or reports generated, or violation of security policies?
The next time you need to make a critical decision, ask yourself how confident you are with the data and information that forms the basis for that decision. There will always be some ambiguity, some extra information you’d like to have, but are you dealing with an acceptable level of risk? And how do you know?
*Director Emeritus, Baldrige Performance Excellence Program at National Institute of Standards and Technology
§Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. Year. Baldrige Excellence Framework®: Proven Leadership and Management Practices for High Performance. Gaithersburg, MD: U.S. Department of Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology.
