Creating impact with data analysis

I have found two important thought process to be useful in delivering highly impactful analysis. They are - 1. Occam's Razor; 2. Lloyd Trotter's advice. So, what are they?

Occam’s Razor:  A 12th century English monk and philosopher, William of Occam (now spelled Ockham, a town 25 miles from London, UK) who predated birth of statistics, came up with the notion that simpler explanation is the preferred one.  Another way to say that is “All things being equal, the simplest solution is usually the best one.” Any explanation must try to reduce the number of causes to the bare minimum necessary for explaining the phenomenon. This is not meant to avoid the devil in the details, you still have to get into the weeds. Ironically, in the field of data analysis & data science, there is very often an anecdotal reference made to 80% of efforts needed to filter out the noise from signal i.e. you have to  get into the details no matter what. When all is said and done you want to explain and correctly attribute a simpler theory to explain what is going on, which brings us to the next point.

Lloyd Trotter's advice: No medication should be prescribed without appropriate diagnosis, and no diagnosis should begin without knowing the symptoms. Same holds for any data analysis. Before you fire off your data discovery, analysis or mining tools whether they spit out fast data visualization or one of the thousands of cool looking D3.js type charts, think about the problem you are solving for.

During my years working at General Electric, I had the privilege to listen to a highly respectable company officer – Mr. Lloyd Trotter, who started his career in the 70’s as a lighting engineer. Mr. Trotter became the business leader for a $13bn business unit within GE later in his career. He said that if you want to be a high performance player, the result of your activities should show up on the company's financial statements.

So, back to the business – begin by asking what is the “intent”, or the goal, then ask what impact does your analysis and modeling expect to create, and what line on the income statement or the balance sheet will that show up.

If you start from a results-oriented perspective and focus on explaining the story in a simpler manner everyone wins.

What are some of your thoughts on generating impactful results with goal oriented mindset and simplicity of analysis?

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