Eliyahu M. Goldratt starts by asking what information is in his book: The haystack syndrome.
Many of us start with a taken-for-granted assumption that given enough data we can build a system that will transform that data into insight – into something useful.
In practice, this ends up with analysts doing large amounts of work that produces output that no one reads or uses.
All of us can point to examples where we spend hours every month creating client reports that don’t appear to be needed.
But we keep spending the time – because that’s the job, we think.
Goldratt suggests that we should instead start with questions, questions that are informed by purpose – which is a more complicated subject in itself.
For example, when it comes to corporate reporting, managers may want to know what is the minimum requirement, what’s the most efficient way to get compliant?
Others may want to know how they can give other managers a breakdown of key numbers that are going to be used to set targets.
Rather than starting with data, we need to select questions that would be useful to answer and transform them into a data collection programme that will help us answer the questions.
But it’s important that we keep the list of questions small – focus on questions that managers actually ask rather than ones we think they may ask.
In a nutshell – if you don’t do something, you can’t do it wrong and it doesn’t cost you anything.
We think that way about energy, about resources.
We should think the same way about data processing – do it only when it’s actually necessary.
Handcrafted insight 