Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog: Deming, lean thinking, innovation, customer focus, continual improvement, six sigma.
December 6, 2005
Data Based Decision Making

Acumen visits Google:

As a first step, we hope to collaborate with interested Googlers to find better ways to learn what works around the world. Identifying powerful solutions to poverty that are useful to people in different settings, and that are market-driven, scalable, and sustainable, is our greatest challenge. Second, we’re hoping to strengthen how the world measures both social and financial returns to investments in delivering critical goods and services to the poor. Like Google, we hold a deep belief in the power of measuring everything we can.

Google has done a fantastic job of using data to make decisions. In fact so much so, that some think they may go overboard trying to find an algorithm for everything. My dinner with Sergey:

It was a classic Google moment. Your S.A.T. score was the measure of your intellectual capability; your GPA represented the numerical summary of your ability to execute on that potential. Your value to Google could be plotted using those two data points.

Sergey’s desire to reduce every decision to an equation would cause me a fair amount of frustration in the years to come. While it forced a discipline on me that was likely lacking in my career up to that point, it also went against my deeply-held conviction that some things are not expressible simply by deriving the correct algorithm. A lot of engineers at Google would dispute that with religious conviction, though they might admit that deriving the correct algorithm would be “non-trivial.”

I believe you can’t measure everything that is important. I also believe in most organizations the amount of stuff you can’t measure usefully and realistically is quite a bit higher than it is for Google. Having highly intelligent, skilled and experienced people who can derive complex formulas effectively does greatly expand the effective use of measurements.

Still there are limits, and those limits are much lower for most organizations that have neither, thousands of phd level mathematicians, rocket scientists, software engineers etc. nor a anything approaching Google’s percentage of such people.

Still I think we will benefit from the innovation that will continue to take place at Google. The are making great strides in using data to inform their decision making process.

3 Responses to “Data Based Decision Making”

  1. Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog » Innovate or Avoid Risk Says:

    There is no substitute for knowledge - W. Edwards Deming.

  2. Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog » Data Analysts Captivated by R’s Power Says:

    R first appeared in 1996, when the statistics professors Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman of the University of Auckland in New Zealand released the code as a free software package…

  3. Curious Cat Blog » Does the Data Deluge Make the Scientific Method Obsolete? Says:

    I must say I am not at all convinced that a new method without theory ready to supplant the existing scientific method. Now I can’t find peter Norvig’s exact words online (come on Google - organize all the World’s information for me please)…

Leave a Reply



Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog © curiouscat.com 2005-2009 powered by WordPress

Internal Links

Author

John Hunter

Tags


Full tag could

Other

Search Blog

Web Search

Management Improvement web search

Recent Comments

  • Jaky Astik: Where there are no problems there is no leadership, because then, no one cares.
  • Tim McMahon: Your post and Shaun’s comments are quite right. I think the there is an evoluation in thinking as...
  • Richard Kunkle, MD: Great blog. What is intriguing here is that we as physicians have focused here on the needs of...
  • Josh: When I buy a car, I want to be able to drive the car to work/home which is about a 20 minute commute each way...
  • Alex: Wow, Google has done it again. This is truly going to change the dynamics of communication as we know it today....
  • Anonymous: We should all be grateful that Toyota is helping out the US economy. My cousin landed a job with Toyota...
  • Oscar: That’s pretty cool from one side but 4 hours to refill the tank is too much time i think. I’d...
  • shaun sayers: This is quite a significant issue Jon, and there is a fine balance to be found On the one hand I...

Archives

December 2005
M T W T F S S
« Nov   Jan »
 1234
567891011
12131415161718
19202122232425
262728293031