Published
The recent seminar report published by the Association on last year’s event: Major Projects Metamorphosis highlighted five key themes in the enablers of (and obstacles to) data analytics. These were, in order of importance:
Data quality – the need for a benign data environment
A shortage of exemplar cases – and a lack of data on what motivates organizations to embrace data analytics;
The scale of the data analytics task – this maybe about data but it requires change management on an unprecedented scale
Fear versus confidence – in simple terms, the fear that your data will be used simply as a rod to beat you
Awareness not analysis – or, in other words, we need people to be able to understand what data is, what it means but we don’t need everyone to become a data analyst
Taken together, they made me think about ‘phantom risks’.
If you have worked on projects for any length of time you know the kind of thing that I am describing; things that are perceived as risks, talked about as risks but aren’t really risks at all. This may be because:
- Our cognitive bias (and probably our aversion to risk) causes us to see a risk where none exists (for example – I am afraid my data may reveal me to be a poor project manager)
- We have been guilty of lazy thinking and simply haven’t bothered to identify the genuine risk but have latched onto another risk altogether (for example – there is a commercial risk associated with sharing our data, rather than there’s a quality issue with sharing our data)
- We have been guilty of assumption (for example – anyone working with data will need to be able to write code. Which is plainly as much sense as discounting someone from heading up an infrastructure project because he or she can’t drive a bulldozer)
- We have been so bamboozled by risks that are not risks because we can simply ‘pre-liminate’ them (by designing the project or working in a particular way, the risk is simply no longer there)
On the other hand, there’s a very different kind of ‘phantom’ risk lurking behind all this; one that may have a huge and very damaging impact but which is a phantom simply because we choose to look right through it: the risk of not undertaking the transformation that is associated with failing to engage whole-heartedly with the new world of data and analytics.
Read the highlights and full reports from Major Projects Metamorphosis.