Insights-Analytics Reporting Excellence: the method is key, not technology

If you still believe technology can resolve your data quality and business analytics challenges, time to break free from dogmatism: what you need is a method, the right Praxis – and we will assist.

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With the right method, it can take up to 20 moves (God’s number) to solve the Cube, which offers 43 quintillions or to put it in perspective, 43,252,003,274,489,856,000 permutations combinations.

This is where you may realise that freedom and pragmatism are not exactly everything you need.

In order to get to the core of this article, I will start from a higher-level contextual approach that I will then narrow down towards my subject, as follows.

What’s the common point between proper Data and Analytics and the successful evolutions of Capitalism?

1. Capitalism evolves thanks to its mutating method – its spirit -, before even the use of technology

2. Data, Analytics & Insights, fruits of capitalist activity and seen as key business assets must follow the same right method to bear healthy fruits

3. How: by breaking free from dogmatism with our bespoke method – Praxis, towards Business Excellence

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Capitalism evolves thanks to its mutating method, before even the use of technology

There is for long a strange dogmatism in political and economic sciences pretending technology can solve all problems.

The New York Time article “Who Made That Rubik’s Cube?”, 2012: link

This essentially negates if not tries to make us forget that we are human beings with brains, in the first place. Any technology is the fruit of human beings thinking, innovation, imagination, and engineering.

This article is not about demonstrating, again and again, how technology tries to dominate the living. Technology is not the solution to human beings’ and businesses’ problems. This is misleading and wrong: Economic science, among others, has known this for a few centuries, actually. And it doesn’t matter that even some Nobel prizes pretend technology is at the centre of growth or the success of capitalism.

Remove human beings and all collapses. No technology will remain.

Technology is only a means to achieve a goal.

Try to apply Toyota’s Five Whys Lean technique: why technology will fix all my Data quality and Analytics issues? Now apply the Why question again to your last answer. Do this five times and please send it to us.

I bet that at some point you will have answered that you believe it will do what it promises.

This way can’t help. Businesses need a different approach and break free from technological dogmatism:

1. First, come the vision and strategy.
2. Then, the right people who design the method, what we call at Reason your unique Praxis tailored to express and deliver your business vision and strategy. This is the modus operandi, if you prefer, the what and how things will be done.
3. Finally, you get to the matter of technology that can only support and assist the realisation, the incarnation of the method into reality.

Over time and space, visions, strategies and methods led to various forms of Capitalism becoming realities all around us. And what we see is, therefore, the visions and strategies held in their guts from the very beginning.

Capitalism’s mutations over decades if not centuries are only the tip of a big iceberg, i.e. it is an adaptation to the transformation of Capitalism’s substance, not its essence: fundamentally, both production or services emerge and succeed or fail in the same way and for the same reasons: either they follow the method and order of success we present here, or they fail.

Data, Analytics & Insights, fruits of capitalist activity and seen as key business assets must follow the same right method to bear healthy fruits

From Business as Usual to Chaos as Usual?

What happens nowadays with most of the Business data is the latest expression of the chaos resulting from a lack of vision and method on how to handle it: many businesses are still imprisoned in this archaic mindset suggesting they can resolve issues and escape from the everyday-growing-bigger data doomed swamp submerging them thanks to technology.

In fact, without proper method, this only opens more pandora boxes and layers of unresolved issues, adding to the layers of existing legacy. It may make then easier to put the fault on the technology which ‘didn’t deliver’ despite being ‘one of the best available’ – and let’s be positive: we need to try something else! Cool…?

The axis vision/strategy => method => technology: where the method is the structure and the process

And everything starts again the next day, in a similar way, until it fails again somewhere. Managing issues and ambient chaos become the new normal. Agile is supposed to address this quickly in “fast-paced environments”, and businesses move from BAU (Business as Usual) to CaU – Chaos as Usual. 

In order to stop and resolve chaos, one needs a certain order that sets the structure of normality and rules that make this normality a self-driven going concern.

The structure and the process constitute the method. 

To bear healthy fruits, Data, Analytics and insights must follow the right method, which is embedded in the axis vision/strategy => method => technology.

Preventing the risk of getting into the ‘failure path dependency’ and culture of issues denial

In Evolutionary Economics, the concept of path dependency expresses the trajectory of self-reinforcing choices made by economic actors. These choices draw a path from which it becomes less and less easy to move away.

As an example, after having invested millions in a technology that failed, and then a few more in fixing it with another technology and lots of top consultants, some decision-makers may start to quickly understand they’d better make it work from now on in any way because they might very soon find themselves in an ejection seat.

As the procurement decision-making around technology involves many people, the resulting failure potentially impacts the image of the very same people, at least the final key decision-makers. This can lead to blaming and shaming, “it’s not me, it’s them”, tensions and political game to clean oneself from any (possible) responsibility down to more or less abusive disciplinary procedures against first-line employees that appear ideal scapegoats of the moment. But this can also result in a let’s not make waves and carry-on attitude creating or reinforcing the ‘failure path dependency’.

This is nothing else than planting the seed of a culture of denial, which will wow about ‘challenging the status quo’ and ‘excellence’ in internal meetings and recruitment ads but will rather ostracise if not bully any professional that will dare to ask too many questions or want to look a bit closer at the whole problem legacy.

Eventually, these path dependencies lead to a system of mediocracy, where the status quo and yes-manism become the new normal that the business culture has an interest in nurturing as long as Business as usual looks ‘good enough’: recruiting a couple of SQL, Python geeks or bandsmen will do to quickly patch in Agile style the now boiling data swamps.

How to: by breaking free from dogmatism with our bespoke method – Praxis, towards Business Excellence

The above contextual introduction is an extract of reasons having led businesses to everything but success with data, and this is in this environment that most readers of this blog find themselves immersed.

The method, a bespoke Praxis is key: to resolve the Rubick’s Cube you need to know how to do it. Then the optimisation of the whole process is a matter of a Continuous Improvement feedback loop that feeds the method towards better results: tweak better or shorter algorithms, get it all done faster, or maybe find a way to rebuild the cube’s faces in certain colours order, or improve the engineering of the design of the Rubik’s Cube so its parts turn in a smoother way hence reducing resolution time, or even try to resolve the Cube with a robotic hand or a mechanical system etc. all this will happen with the support of technology once we know when we start from, where we go and what we want to achieve. But technology can’t resolve this upfront.

The same happens with your Business Data sets, Analytics and Insights.

Reason can assist you in setting up the right method, and the right Praxis, ensuring the delivery of your vision and strategy and tweaking those accordingly if needed to maximise your journey towards a healthy path dependency of profits and business excellence.

Then only, will come the right time to assess what technology is the most suitable to express your strategy and Praxis.

In order to get the best of what is now becoming an ‘asset’ (not in financial terms yet, though), and generate robust and useful Insights & Analytics – your bespoke Praxis, the method that will create and convert data towards a strategic driver to Business Excellence – needs to interact with the remaining pillars or our unique Praxis approach, as follows:

1.  Vision & Strategy design and delivery
2. Business Continuity & Risk Governance
3. Performance & Outcomes Management
4. Continuous Improvement
5. World-class Insights/Analytics – making the invisible, visible
6. Business Excellence, as the outcome of 1. to 5.

More on our Praxis Services can be found here.

By analogy, the above streams of strategic activities across a business can be seen as the ways one needs to work their way through to resolve the Rubick’s Cube.

How to do it then is Reason’s expertise and value-added that we are more than happy to bring on board of Executive decision-makers.

Reason can assist you to make sense of your data, analytics and insights, and achieve together more Business Excellence.

Thank you for your time and interest.

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Initial publication: 16 Feb. Updated 9th Mar, 21 Apr 2021, 15 Aug 2023