All Posts Tagged With: "data"
Reality Check in Japan
Making assumptions about the world around us is human nature. We have a sense for how the world operates and we interpret information and events based on our experiences and expectations. Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, calls these assumptions “leaps of abstraction.”
We make leaps of abstraction at work all the time. We assume we know what our customers require, what engages our employees, the source of a problem, and our marketplace and competitors. Because our assumptions may not, in truth, reflect reality, acting on them can cause all sorts of problems, and learning the truth through sound data and information can challenge our most dearly held beliefs.
This is what happened recently in Japan. Japan has a reputation for producing many of the world’s oldest people due, it has long claimed, to superior diet and a commitment to the elderly. It assumed it excelled in this area—until police found the body of one of the country’s centenarians, a man believed to be 111, who had been dead for more than thirty years.
The shocking discovery challenged a long-held belief, prompting officials to verify the status of the other centenarians in the country. According to an article in the New York Times by Martin Fackler, one of Tokyo’s oldest citizens at 113 had not been seen since the 1980s. City officials tried to visit a 125-year-old only to discover that her registered address had been turned into a city park in 1981.
To date, authorities have been unable to find 281 Japanese…
16Aug2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedData from a New Perspective
We have all seen more than our shares of charts and tables. Data in columns and rows. If we’re lucky, a trend chart. Numbers filling pages filling handouts filling binders.
That’s why it is always delightful to find a new way of presenting information, as Doug McCune has done with crime in San Francisco. He took real data, aggregated it geographically, and artistically rendered it as elevation. More crime mean higher elevation. You have to see the maps to understand their impact. Click here to see the hills and mountains of San Francisco created by larceny, narcotics, assault, vandalism, warrants, prostitution, vehicle theft, and robbery.
As McCune points out, the features are pretty consistent across all of the maps. It looks like the northeast center of the city easily has the highest crime rate across all types of crimes. The most dramatic map is the prostitution map with its twin peaks casting shadows over the city.
It made me think of how an elevation map could be used to show an organization’s data. For example, if you measure quality at different points in a process, you could map the process and use the quality measures to create elevation along the route. If you work for a utility, you could use outage data to create elevation maps that showed where most outages occur in the area you serve. Sure, you already have the data and everybody knows that bigger numbers mean more outages, but visualizing those outages can have a powerful impact.
Governments could use elevation…
9Jun2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedCost Is One Factor
If you were going to build a 70,000 square-foot headquarters for 325 workers, where would you construct it? New York or Sioux Falls, South Dakota? San Francisco or Little Rock? Minneapolis or Oklahoma City?
What factors would you consider in your decision? The availability and educational level of potential workers might be an issue. Quality of life could be important. Access to global markets, major transportation systems, research universities, large customer groups, or diverse employee candidates may be valuable.
Another factor is cost. For those narrow-minded organizations that think cost is all that matters—or that cheaper trumps everything—Boyd Co. Inc. has a list for you. According to Boyd, the most expensive U.S. cities to put 325 employees into a 70,000 square-foot headquarters are New York, San Francisco, Stamford (CT), San Jose, and Newark. The cheapest are Sioux Falls, Little Rock, Virginia Beach, Oklahoma City, and Columbus, South Carolina. The difference between New York, the most expensive at $30.7 million a year, and Sioux Falls, the cheapest at $21.1 million, is significant. And yet more companies choose New York than Sioux Falls because, as noted, cost is just one factor in the equation.
By the way, Minneapolis ranked fifteenth on the list of 50 cities at $26.2 million. Sure, you have to pay about $5 million more than you would in Sioux Falls, but you’ll save $4.5 million over New York while enjoying a metropolitan area with several universities, professional sports, theater and art, an entrepreneurial spirit, and headquarters for several global leaders including…
12Apr2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedMy Personal Baldrige: Process
Baldrige is a process model. The first six categories in the Baldrige Criteria ask “how” things are done more than 130 times—and “how” means “what’s the process.” Processes are evaluated based on how systematic and effective your approaches are, how consistently they are deployed, how systematically they are evaluated and improved, and how well they are aligned with what your organization is trying to accomplish. In addition, the Process Management category specifically explores how you design, manage, and improve your key processes.
Here are steps you can take to apply process thinking to your job:
- Identify the processes you participate in. Everything you do is part of a process.
- For each process, figure out who your customers and suppliers are (they may be internal).
- Determine your, your customers’, and your suppliers’ requirements. You all have requirements of the process, i.e, levels of quality, delivery, service, and cost. Ask customers and suppliers what their requirements are.
- Identify measures you can use to evaluate how well these requirements are being met and start collecting and graphing the data for these measures. You can find information about tools to collect and analyze data here.
- When you have enough data (you need three data points to show a trend, so start with three months of data), analyze it to see how your part of the process is performing.
- If there’s a noticeable decline in performance or if the level of performance isn’t very good, use tools your organization specifies to improve it. If your organization doesn’t offer any tools, learn how to use the Plan-Do-Check-Act methodology.…
Misleading Data
A recent article in BusinessWeek misuses data to make its point. “The Dividends from Green Offices” (Christopher Palmeri, December 7, 2009) describes a survey of 2,000 tenants in 154 buildings in the U.S. with Energy Star labels or LEED certification. According to the article, “The survey found that employees took an average 2.9 fewer sick days each year in their environmentally sound offices than in their previous, nongreen workplaces…Some 55% of tenants also reported a rise in employee productivity in their green digs.” The article notes that “most tenants also expressed a belief that their healthier environments helped them retain their staffs and burnish their image with clients.”
Maybe I’m a skeptic, but I’m guessing that the economy may have had an impact on sick days and productivity. There may have been changes in sick leave policies. Or process improvements. Which is more likely, that fewer sick days and higher productivity result from better ventilation and more natural light or from worries about losing your job and having to do more work with fewer people?
And “most tenants expressed a belief”? Where’s the data to support that claim?
There are three statements in the article that seem more solid:
- “Sending tenants individual utility bills caused them to consume 21% less electricity on average.”
- “Green buildings were able to command higher rents” (about 10% higher).
- “Vacancy rates were lower—about 16.6%, vs. 17.2%” (although, again, this could be due to a number of factors).
None of these three statements would necessarily encourage businesses to rent space in a “green” building. However, if…
1Dec2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedInterpreting Results
The results reported in Category 7 of a Baldrige application should show current levels of performance, trends, and comparisons. They should address what is important to your organization as described in the first six Categories and the Profile and they should include valid indicators of future performance.
Consider this chart.
It shows current levels of performance and a trend over a longer period of time than most organizations display. When performance shows this kind of variability, some organizations include a trend line to clarify the direction this measure is heading, although, in this case, the direction is pretty clear.
The “organization” in this chart happens to be Earth, with temperature data from the National Climatic Data Center. “Normal” is the average temperature from 1901 to 2000. In an article in the October 27, 2009, StarTribune (“Statisticians downplay the notion that the Earth is really cooling”), Seth Borenstein includes this chart as evidence of global warming.
Of course, in the interest of impartiality despite all evidence to the contrary, he quotes Don Easterbrook, a Western Washington University geology professor, who said, “I don’t argue with you that the 10-year average for the past 10 years is higher than the previous 10 years. We started the cooling trend after 1998.”
Actually, even after a warm 1998 we’ve continued to get warmer, as this chart shows.
As Deke Arndt, NOAA climate monitoring chief, said, “The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record.” And it’s getting warmer, not cooler, which is a valid indicator of…
27Oct2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
