So you’re having a heart-attack, and you’re sitting in the waiting room instead of the operating room because the hospital failed to analyze their performance data. They had tons of data on waiting time, to be sure—they just hadn’t looked at it. An article from today’s NYT gives a frightening example of what can happen when an organization fails to use data analysis techniques to transform data into knowledge:
Three [University of California, San Francisco] researchers have won the Nobel Prize in the last two decades. It’s the sort of place that should be able to handle heart attacks.
For years, the doctors who worked there thought they were doing exactly that. They hadn’t actually looked at the data, but they assumed they were doing a good job […] The attitude, recalled Dr. Robert M. Wachter, chief of the medical service, was: “We’re U.C.S.F.; we’re smart; we do fine.”
But in 2002, when they realized that hospital regulators would soon be releasing the data to the public, they started paying attention to it. Shockingly, heart attack patients spent almost three hours on average at U.C.S.F. before their arteries were unblocked. Some had their electrocardiogram languish on a clipboard in the emergency room while doctors dealt with other patients [...].
To be fair, U.C.S.F. was faster than most hospitals, but its delays were still almost certainly killing some people and leaving others disabled. Patients have the best chance of recovery if their arteries are opened within two hours, research has shown.
Granted, it’s unlikely that a customer of yours will risk death if you don’t sort through your mountain of transaction data. But as an object lesson, the point is clear: if you don't put the data you've collected to use, opportunities may be lost, threats may go unseen, and some customers may go away and never come back.
