You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know!

I was preparing a presentation titled “The Winning Edge” for a group of insurance brokers and I was thinking about the importance of data.

A small company of 20 or 30 employees generates a lot of important data – data critical to making fundamental business decisions, to determining the company’s course and to increasing productivity.

Unfortunately, much of the data is never collected and that which is received by mid- and upper-tier management is virtually useless. Why?

Because too often data is collated and reported by IT professionals for IT boffins.

Even in the boardrooms of enterprise-grade corporations, each individual board member has a different level of understanding of the information contained in a report. For example, it’s unlikely that the Head of Marketing will understand the consequences of downstream cash flow on R & D based on 200 pages of numbers, charts, graphs, circles and arrows. It’s still gibberish to that executive.

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