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Answering the real questions in data analysis

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A guy walks into your cube and asks you to whip up an econometric model. You’re a statistician, after all, and you’ve got a Ph.D. in something or other. You do this for lunch, he figures.

He “over-thought,” says the one whose cube such a guy walked into. Theresa Doyon has been routinely navigating datasets in the 50 to 300 million-unit range for 10 years. She’s good at all-terrain tools like SAS and KXEN. She could have produced the report he wanted. Instead, she asked him, “Why?”

They talked for an hour. What he actually needed, she discovered, was more of a descriptive report — something that gives a picture of a current situation.… Read the rest “Answering the real questions in data analysis”

Let your gray hair light your way through unfamiliar data

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How do you approach unfamiliar data? An investment banker I talked to last week — one I know from a client’s whitepaper — rejects the “don’t think” method, advocated in my earlier post about Dan Murray. Instead, he thinks first, on paper.

“My approach is driven by having a bunch of gray hair,” says Michael Princi, managing director of ThoughtStorm Strategic Capital, a boutique investment bank and advisory firm in northern New Jersey. “I want to use my business acumen to tease out what might be the underlying issues.”

Experience counts The naive mind is prone to bad mistakes, he says.… Read the rest “Let your gray hair light your way through unfamiliar data”

Beginner’s mind in IT

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A young information technology worker in a large organization follows his common sense — and his boss scolds for it. The question is how to respond.

Back in 1980, he had just started at his first job, at the CBS Television Network. He soon noticed that every week business people asked him for the same data from the same source. So he did the logical thing: he wrote an algorithm for himself to save time.

Then he did the next logical thing: he gave the algorithm to the business people. They could do it themselves, and he didn’t have to do it for them.… Read the rest “Beginner’s mind in IT”