In today’s over-complex world, one way to success is to first start with a question, “What is important to our customers?”

A quick story can illustrate this.

A 5-year old is crying, frustrated she can’t tie her shoe.  You take care of it, dry her tears, problem solved… then she bursts into tears again.  With a little more digging, you learn she’s really mad at her brother.  She just happened to be fighting with her shoe at the same time.

Fixing the wrong problem is unfortunately a common thing.  A better approach is to take time for uncovering and understanding the needs and to clarify what you know about the challenge as well as what you don’t know.  This way you can target efforts and achieve results that matter faster and more effectively.

Data can always be gathered but are you measuring what is most easily measured (data that are in our legacy systems and data warehouses) rather than what is most meaningful?  Technologies are available to easily collect this data and they are improving.

So many companies have yet to figure out how to use their valuable small data but they are ‘leap frogging’ to big data without a second thought.  Today the concepts around big data are leading the use of big data.  The actual data are what’s available, most likely not collected with our business questions in mind, and we are trying to make it work.

There’s no question the new technologies will be used.  If we’re going to really capitalize on big data, we need to add human insight at machine scale. We will need some type of balanced systems that not only perform data analysis, but then also communicate the results that they find in a clear, concise narrative form.