Collecting Data to Improve Your Business

In his New York Times Magazine article 'The Data-Driven Life' Gary Wolf illustrates a very interesting view on data collection. I found a couple of particular clips from that article that relate directly to business:

"We have blind spots in our field of vision and gaps in our stream of attention....These weaknesses put us at a disadvantage. We make decisions with partial information. We are forced to steer by guesswork. We go with our gut."

"If you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data."

This human characteristic led to the creation of KM Executive. In order to make informed decisions about the operation of your business you need to be able to see trends and in order to see trends you need to be able to track information. People are not apt to do this on their own no matter how many forms or how much paperwork you try to force them to fill out. I believe this is because people somehow know they are not going to like what they see. The idea is to have a way to glean information from the stream of data that your business generates by doing what it does.

KMX was initially established as a tool to organize business process documentation, with a focus on systematic improvement. We soon realized that the tracking of metrics required to measure improvement had to be closely tied to the documentation system if people were going to use it. Ultimately we concluded that both of these processes must be an integrated part of the operation's daily workflow so that people were not maintaining two systems. We learned that if people had to go very far out of their way to contribute to system improvement they were less likely to do so. What the company ends up with, in that event, is partial information.

Additionally, people generally do have a poor sense of time. Gathering precise data about where time is going is the objective. For many businesses time is going to be the primary metric of the effectiveness of a business process. KMX integrates project, task, time, and process management into one tool that allows businesses to capture and track the data they need to implement innovative change.