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Short review of 1st Inspiration Lunch

29th of January, 2014, Berlin

Hammer & nails Be a team, not a tool Cultural change More (data-) quality than

quantity

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Data and its analyses are not an end unto themselves. So it

should be outlined very clearly which questions could be

answered and how high are the costs compared to the

benefits.

Many companies have a lot of data and often think: There

will be something valuable about the results.

However, this is not for certain. There is a famous German

metaphor of the hammer and the nail, making clear, that it’s

not the most important thing in the world that there is data

but that it depends on which problems they might track

down and which solutions they can create when there are

non yet.

#1 hammer & nails

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#2 more (data) quality than quantity

It’s not only the amount of data but it’s about the quality of

the collected data so that you can filter reliable information

out of them.

Nowadays it's quite easy to get information that would have

been hard to get about ten years ago. However, the

reliability of data has not increased necessarily. Everyday

we need to respond to polls constantly, fill in forms for

newsletters etc. We know that the data, we entrust

Facebook etc., live their own life - not just since the NSA

scandal.

Therefore we aren’t completely honest sometimes – when

we respond at all. It’s our choice to say anything and if we

do, what we want to say. This raises the question: Is the

data we collect actually qualitative high and how solid are

the conclusions you’re drawing?

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#3 be a team, not a tool

GSMA

Even with a sufficient data quality it’s not guaranteed that a

lot of data automatically mean success. It’s rather about the

talents ensuring that data also lead to useful insights that

can be used for their business.

Of course, this includes a dedicated data scientist, someone

who is able to deal with large amounts of data and who can

“edit” them with statistical techniques. It’s not wrong to have

a data professional up your sleeve, but he works best within

a dedicated team consisting of IT experts and other

classical business intelligence professionals.

Or else the data analysis will be rather complicated and

hardly communicable. We need efficient solutions in order to

shape the data collection und its analysis and to find data-

based solutions and improvements for existing and new

processes within the company.

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#4 cultural change It seems like all these insights make a cultural change within

the companies necessary. Although requirements like these

are often made vaguely, the expectations of the outcome

are enormous. But it's less a revolution rather than an

evolution.

Data is often still seen as the solution, not as the road to

success. Especially in the field of communications data

never is the solution but merely a tool to find exactly that.

Unlike in physics the laws that regulate human behavior are

very difficult to predict. A vast number of factors are

important for any answers. Data will help us to work and

become more accurate and better.

The more we know about our target audience the more can

we communicate. This requires a new mindset. Data won’t

lead us to that one perfect solution but it can help to select

and to continuously improve the communication. In the age

of content marketing, it is important to remember how to

optimize content. Improving the communication is the heart

of data analysis and that means to do more experiments

and to test different contents and formats. It’s not big data

making the difference but the mindset. It’s the data basis

that allows us to become better and better.

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