Data-ism

Without advances in technology, there is no progress. But technology alone isn’t destiny by any means. For technology to really pay off, other crucial ingredients must go into the recipe: investment, time, and the optimism to keep going, to keep spending the dollars and energy to make things happen.

There is a natural tension between the measurement imperative and measurement myopia. Two quotes frame the issue succinctly. The first: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” For this one, there appear to be twin claims of attribution, either W. Edwards Deming, the statistician and quality control expert, or Peter Drucker, the management consultant. Who said it first doesn’t matter so much. It’s a mantra in business and it has the ring of commonsense truth.
The second quote is not as well known, but there is a lot of truth in it as well: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Albert Einstein usually gets credit for this one, but the stronger claim of origin belongs to the sociologist William Bruce Cameron—though again, who said it first matters far less than what it says.

Decisions of all kinds will increasingly be made based on data and analysis rather than on experience and intuition