Miles Neale (7/24/2014)
Steve,In reading both your post and the reference article, I find them both true and accurate. There are those who will look at data as the hallowed scrolls that should never be questioned. I remember years back someone saying "the, data, the whole data, and nothing but the data!" In addition, I think that was followed by "So Help Me Codd." However, that was long ago and about modeling.
However, it is not really just the data. Trends within the data, trends in the metadata concerning use and usability tend to help us think more of the process and what we are doing. Further, there is a knowing that something is not right, or trending in a different direction and things could be made better. This is not always a wild dream as some things are, but it often is some specific out of the box thinking that might just revolutionize what we are looking at.
We have to have the statisticians and gurus to maintain the status quo and advance it as far as it can be. Nevertheless, we must also have those who have the gut feel that it can be made better. Some of the time, you know in your knower that things need to changes, even if the data has not told the story yet. Your knower and experience can forewarn us that change is necessary to better meet the future that is headed your way.
M.
And that's where the chicken and egg part of this conversation comes in. In many cases the "gut feeling" you're sensing is related to data you've previously digested: your "knower" has detected a much higher level pattern or the fact that the old pattern no longer plays, and the current data you're seeing just hasn't caught up (or isn't designed to pick up on the new pattern).
My first boss was like this: her "gut" was based on 30 years in the trenches, so it was really grounded in a much larger body of facts than I could easily muster. She couldn't necessarily justify how she got to many of her conclusions, but put to the test, they were dead on most times.
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?