Links for March 10 2013
- Know the Difference Between Your Data and Your Metrics – Jeff Bladt and Bob Filbin – Harvard Business Review
Quote: In the business world, we talk about the difference between vanity metrics and meaningful metrics. Vanity metrics are like dandelions – they might look pretty, but to most of us, they’re weeds, using up resources, and doing nothing for your property value. Vanity metrics for your organization might include website visitors per month, Twitter followers, Facebook fans, and media impressions. Here’s the thing: if these numbers go up, it might drive up sales of your product. But can you prove it? If yes, great. Measure away. But if you can’t, they aren’t valuable.
- Business versus IT and Other Tense Marriages | Inside the Biz with Jill Dyche
Quote: Redefining collaboration between business and IT means bringing people together in more innovative ways. Managers more likely to dispense with protracted in-person meetings in favor of using on-line social communities and automated workflow software, letting different organizations and remote workers participate fully. Job roles and work tasks are clearer and delivery times are tighter. Lifting lessons from the agile playbook, these companies make sure that outcomes are well-understood by all, and those who are closest to delivery have a say in the cost-benefit conversation. Projects are not only being delivered at a faster pace, but a greater percentage of them meet requirements and are delivered on time.
- Data? What is it good for? Absolutely … something — Tech News and Analysis
Quote: It is fashionable these days to either like big data or just malign big data. Regardless of what your personal feelings are, the question has always been and will always be – what is data good for. Here are three stories to illustrate those questions.
- What do you mean by marketing as a science? – Chief Marketing Technologist
Quote: Science in marketing is the systematic quest for knowledge. Not absolute truth, but effective working knowledge that can be applied to growing a business.
- Pixar’s 22 Rules of Storytelling « Aerogramme Writers’ Studio
Quote: No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.
- Innovate on Purpose: Innovation and the concept of Flow
Quote: The reason innovation seems so difficult to many organizations is that it is virtually impossible for anyone or any team to get anywhere near the "flow", to get into the innovation "zone". Innovation teams are placed under inordinate pressure to deliver valuable results with little time and no training, often with poor direction and no tools or methodologies. Instead of defining skills and finding the right people, we corral the available people and kick off projects with little forethought or definition. Then executives wonder why innovation seems so difficult or returns results that seem so incremental.
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