Direct competition with peers inhibits collaboration.
At Predictive Analytics World (#pawcon on Twitter), one of my favorite people in the statistics field, Arnold Goodman of Collaborative Data Solutions, co-presented “Delivering Data-Driven Value Through a Collaboration Culture” with Stephanie Behnke, President of California General Underwriters Insurance.
Arnie believes tribal cultures and their immune systems are primary inhibitors of collaboration. He suggests ways to selectively relax those inhibitors so we can improve the competitive future of predictive analytics. Then, people can enrich their organizations by managing prediction quality through genuine collaboration among stakeholder teams.
“Emergent practices can be developed collaboratively while solving problems for which there are no definitive answers.” ~ Harold Jarche
Suggesting that our focus should be on creating the analytics culture first, Arnie draws on Drucker's Philosphies, Deming's Principles, Juran's Processes and Ackoff's Pitfalls in this presentation.
How can we use data more effectively? Partial views can hide the main view. We need to focus on all of our big data to capture relationships and predictions, not vignettes of little data. Then, what may be even harder, we need to use the insights from our big data as our GPS to overrule standard operating procedure and gut feeling.
I loved the inclusion of this comedy clip as an example of analytics’ need to evaluate results vs. reality.
Preparing minds to collaborate is extremely hard.
While Arnie and Stephanie seem to hold a position that opposes Kaggle's philosophy that competition wins over collaboration in producing predictive analytics successes, this presentation helped us understand the resistance to collaborate, and we considered which remedies we should try back in our offices.
Will you note some recent work examples where your company/culture rewarded collaboration?
2 Comments
Thank you for sharing these insights. My observations are that people tend to share their analytic insights and are enthusiastic about their findings. We certainly find this to be the case in our work with companies.
That's excellent, Deb. The healthcare industry, for one, shows astounding benefits of sharing analytic insights.
Jason Burke's 21st century predictions for the healthcare industry are encouraging too. "Whereas the historical view of health communication involved one-on-one exchanges between two or three practitioners, health care delivery will become truly collaborative. Multiple practitioners across institutions will work together to develop and monitor treatment programs for their patients. Providers, researchers and payers will learn how to maximize health outcomes at the individual patient level. And patients themselves will be active collaborators and contributors to their own therapies and wellness efforts." http://www.sas.com/news/feature/health_analytics.html
Technology is critical to sharing analytic insights. Sharing analytic insights just got easier! SAS Visual Analytics, announced March 22, 2012, can solve many business problems. http://www.sas.com/presscenter/visual-analytics/index.html
For example, a marketing campaign manager at a retailer with hundreds of stores and a thriving online sales channel needs faster, more sophisticated next-best-offer recommendations for customers. SAS Visual Analytics allows its analysts to look at all data from online sales, stores, external demographic information and social media. They can visually explore the data based on any variety of measures, quickly and easily. Fresh analytic insights can be shared either through the internet or iPads to improve decision-making across the business.
Talk about driving business value...high-performance analytics wins the race! Successes like that retailer's definitely inspire collaboration.