Question

Quality improvements are often based in data. One of the issues I often run into is that I am often not confident about the numbers and how they are tracked. I call it dirty data. It was collected incorrectly, on old legacy systems, or incomplete. That said you have to figure out how to make use of them to implement programs. I had a marketing manager tell me one day that "if you torture a number long enough it will confess to anything." How much do you rely on data and are you confident in the numbers?

Answer 1

I make decisions based on 75% data and 25% experience. Based on this process, the fact that data can sometimes be misleading also exists and therefore we need to recognize better data collection processes and how as decision makers, we need to be confident enough to discern when raw, unprocessed or simply unusable data is presented to us.

The reason behind this is that while experience can consist of a number of biases and prejudices or even the need for security which comes through familiarity of processes, the fact that data is current, based on the specific problems and easily represented would make the perfect argument for its use. I am therefore confident in what the data represents and based on how the data is collected, I would base my decision process over it.