Leading in Analytics

TASK 7Responsible Analytics

OUR ANALYTICS RESPONSIBILITY

Analytics is a wonderful tool for understanding the world. As illustrated with the DAD (decision‐centric, action‐centric, and data‐centric) analytics framework throughout this book, it can help you make better decisions, explore new possibilities, and drive action. All of these benefits can be incredibly useful to organizations and our society. They have been shown to lead to a competitive advantage, rapidly change entire industries, and improve positive behaviors such as with health and well‐being.

However, it can also lead people astray, to be fooled or tricked by randomness without the proper safeguards, and deceived by those who use biased numbers masquerading as analytics, to essentially lie with numbers for political or monetary gain. Even with good intentions, it is easy to be led astray by micro‐focusing on things that do not matter much, missing other more important tasks and opportunities inside and outside of analytics.

It is easy to be fooled by someone or some algorithm with fancy numbers, graphs, charts, and predictions. As long as it has been around, statistics has been used to lie and mislead by those with their own agendas who see it as nothing more than a tool to get what they want, rather than a philosophy of discovery, one that can lead to truth and better outcomes for us, those we care about, and the world.

It is also just as easy to be fooled by randomness, finding something that is not true, even ...