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https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article...nstead it requires analysis,of data is a myth.
In the popular 1950s and 1960s television show Dragnet, Sargent Joe Friday, played by Jack Webb, craved objective facts, famously asking witnesses to provide “just the facts.”
Managers today similarly crave facts. The potential positives of working from objective facts are enticing. It’s expected that improved performance follows from basing decisions on facts, whether in traditionally heuristics-based industries such as health care or in causally imprecise contexts such as business strategy.
But our world is awash in data, and data is not the same thing as facts. Facts are much harder to come by than data. While data seems to promise objectivity, instead it requires analysis — which is replete with subjective interpretation.
Assuredly, having data is a necessary step toward making objective decisions. Yet the objectivity of data is a myth. Modern analytical methods afford creative and flexible uses of data that can support multiple perspectives and competing analyses about the same data sets.
In the popular 1950s and 1960s television show Dragnet, Sargent Joe Friday, played by Jack Webb, craved objective facts, famously asking witnesses to provide “just the facts.”
Managers today similarly crave facts. The potential positives of working from objective facts are enticing. It’s expected that improved performance follows from basing decisions on facts, whether in traditionally heuristics-based industries such as health care or in causally imprecise contexts such as business strategy.
But our world is awash in data, and data is not the same thing as facts. Facts are much harder to come by than data. While data seems to promise objectivity, instead it requires analysis — which is replete with subjective interpretation.
Assuredly, having data is a necessary step toward making objective decisions. Yet the objectivity of data is a myth. Modern analytical methods afford creative and flexible uses of data that can support multiple perspectives and competing analyses about the same data sets.