Big data can’t make decisions for you

Data can be a powerful tool to help you optimize just about anything—from your online marketing to your company’s personnel decisions.

When Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer decided to end remote working, she relied on data to help make her decision:

After spending months frustrated at how empty Yahoo parking lots were, Mayer consulted Yahoo’s VPN logs to see if remote employees were checking in enough.

Mayer discovered they were not — and her decision was made.

It’s not just businesses following using data for decisions. The Obama campaign obsessively measured its every activity, and sports franchises collect volumes of data about their players’ performance.

Data can help you, too—if you know what to do with it

“Data is an incredibly valuable resource for organizations,” Rob Bluey reports from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, “but you must be able to communicate its value to stakeholders making decisions—whether that’s in the pursuit of athletes or voters.”

That value, though, isn’t inherent. Marketing and behavioral data, which exists in unimaginably vast quantities, drives no decisions on its own. It’s essentially useless without smart people asking good questions.

Start with a good question

At Yahoo, data did not make Mayer’s decision for her. She started with a business question—are employees actually working from home the way they’re supposed to?—and then used data to arrive at an answer.

Likewise, piles of data about Barack Obama’s online supporters didn’t, of itself, make decisions for the Obama campaign, either. Instead, their marketers started with a question: whether their gut instincts about web design or e-mail behavior were right. They then set up a test to answer the question, and used behavioral data to draw conclusions.

Your question doesn’t need to be revolutionary. In fact, it can be mundane. But without a question, all the data you collect will just sit there collecting dust.