How Can You Have An Intelligent Enterprise If It’s Running On Dumb Data?

Innovation How Can You Have An Intelligent Enterprise If It’s Running On Dumb Data? Carl Rodrigues Forbes Councils Member Forbes Technology Council COUNCIL POST Expertise from Forbes Councils members, operated under license. Opinions expressed are those of the author. | Membership (fee-based) Jul 27, 2022, 06:15am EDT | Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Carl Rodrigues is President, CEO and Founder at SOTI , a trusted provider of mobile and IoT management solutions.

getty Everybody talks about building an “intelligent enterprise,” which is obviously the right goal. After all, there’s abundant evidence that the business world is not nearly as intelligent as it could be. But what is an “intelligent enterprise,” really? Ideally, it’s an enterprise with thousands of millions of sensors gathering real-time insights about what’s really happening out in the real world that exists outside the executive suite.

In a perfect sci-fi version of the intelligent enterprise, all the data would be available in real time, be squeaky clean and instantly usable and never ambiguous or contradictory. But that’s not the world we live in, is it? In reality, it’s incredibly hard to get good data. Think of data as water: It starts at a source, and you consume whatever comes out of the pipe.

So, the first question is always, “How clean is the source?” A lot of the time, it’s really not clean at all. It’s dumb data. A lot of data is only human.

Data collected from a machine—the diagnostics mechanics, can get data from a chip in your car engine when you take it in for service, for example—is generally pretty reliable. MORE FOR YOU Google Issues Warning For 2 Billion Chrome Users Forget The MacBook Pro, Apple Has Bigger Plans Google Discounts Pixel 6, Nest & Pixel Buds In Limited-Time Sale Event Data collected when humans are involved is another thing entirely. Humans just aren’t good at filling out forms with lots of details.

Like a lot of companies, my organization uses a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to accumulate data about our sales efforts. In theory, it can tell us a lot about why we won a contract or didn’t. But while the data looks objective, it really isn’t.

People may not remember the details properly or “forget” to include data that doesn’t make them look good. Or they might not be able to put their finger on why the prospect said no when we thought they’d say yes. That’s just one narrow example, but when you multiply that across a huge enterprise, it’s important to remember that the “objective” data in any given report is homogenized from dozens of similarly flawed sources.

It might be directionally right, or it might be entirely wrong. That’s why when it comes to data, what I rely on most is my intuition. That might sound shocking in a world that demands that we should all be “data-driven” and “follow the science.

” Still, when everybody tells you the data is right, but in your gut, it just doesn’t make sense—pay attention to that feeling. “The data doesn’t lie”—or does it? In the days before the pandemic, my company attended a large retail tradeshow every year, and we invested a lot of money to send our top people there. Eight years ago, we decided to see how much revenue we were driving by attending.

When we reviewed the data, it showed that we were losing money on the show. My instant reaction was, “that just can’t be true. ” Sure, we were spending a lot, but we expected a strong ROI.

But I was assured, “the data is the data, and the data doesn’t lie. ” To make a long story short, the data was the data, but humans entered it wrong. Sometimes important data was not entered; other times, they made simple errors—for example, they entered dates in a month/day/year format (e.

g. , 1/9/2018) rather than the proper day/month/year format (9/1/2018). So, when our analysis reports were showing us revenue, we were looking at the wrong month, or data was just missing.

Yes, “the data is the data,” but if it doesn’t make sense, it means that “the data is wrong. ” As someone who works with data every day, I have a healthy respect for it, but I don’t let it run my business. As a CEO, intuition is perhaps the most powerful tool I have.

More often than not, it’s better than data. Being a centaur is smart. There’s a lot of talk about artificial intelligence (AI) these days.

But AI learns from data from the past and uses those learnings to make good predictions or decisions for the future. Having good data is key, even for AI. Have you heard about AI centaurs, a creature that is human in the front and uses AI in the back? The idea started in chess .

Could AI and a human work together to beat AI alone? The answer turns out to be a resounding yes. The reason is simple. A chess grandmaster is pretty amazing at intuiting strategy but only OK at considering the endlessly branching outcomes of every possible move.

For computers, it’s the exact opposite. A centaur—a hybrid of a person and AI—turns out to be a really smart idea for a lot of tasks. You get the benefits of data without losing the power of intuition.

It’s even being incorporated into writing software. Recently GitHub launched a new AI tool called Copilot. Here’s how chief executive Nat Friedman describes it: “It helps you quickly discover alternative ways to solve problems, write tests and explore new APIs without having to tediously tailor a search for answers on the Internet.

As you type, it adapts to the way you write code—to help you complete your work faster. ” None of us should blindly trust data. An intelligent enterprise needs to leverage all of the different kinds of intelligence available to it—including our own intuition and that of trusted members of our team.

Look at the data. But trust your gut. Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives.

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