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8 Quick Tips to Improve Decision Making With Better Data Quality

The term "data quality" on the search engine results in six million pages, which clearly expresses the importance of data quality and its crucial role in the decision-making context. However, understanding the data helps classify and qualify it for effective use in the required scenario. 

Understanding the Quality of Data

Good quality data is accurate, consistent, and scalable. Data should also be helpful in decision-making, operations, and planning. On the other hand, lousy quality data can cause a delay in deploying a new system, damaged reputation, low productivity, poor decision-making, and loss of revenue. According to a report by The Data Warehousing Institute, poor quality customer data costs U.S. businesses approximately $611 billion per year. The research also found that 40 percent of firms have suffered losses due to insufficient data quality. 

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Abandon Overconfidence And Engage In The Rethinking Cycle

An argument with a coworker — conflict of opinion. Working on a project that doesn't energize you — conflict of interest. Didn't get the promotion — conflict of growth. Working super hard with no time for personal life — internal conflict. Saying yes to work that doesn't align with your goals — conflict of priorities. Committed a mistake, but can't come to terms with accepting responsibility — conflict of values. We don't realize it, but most interactions at work lead to a major or minor conflict.

When it's a minor conflict, we feel a sense of discomfort in our body but can't pinpoint the exact source of the discomfort. Most of the time we ignore this conflict while it sits within our subconscious as we go on with our daily life. A major conflict, though, looks and feels very different. Even though there's no real danger, our mind perceives the conflict as a threat.

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What Matters In Goals?

In most organizations, big-picture thinking comes off as a seasonal flavor often appearing every few months. Mental gymnastics that goes with determining the “why” — meaning or purpose of goals, the promise of a better future, and the excitement of doing something new definitely gets the creative juices flowing. Though not for all, most people in the organization find this phase highly energizing and exhilarating. But does this motivation last long? 

The big picture thinking soon goes out of the picture, being replaced by its nitty-gritty sister who’s only concerned with the “what” — the actual mechanics of getting from point A to point B, steps in the process. With the hostile takeover of the nitty-gritty thinking that’s only concerned with the “what”, the memory of big picture thinking with its “why” soon fades away. What happens then?

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How To Disagree the Right Way At Work

how to disagree the right way

What can make us incredibly valuable at work - our willingness to disagree openly and commit to helping others succeed or sticking to our arguments even when others have moved forward and a decision has been made.

A decision that does not go our way is not an attack on our identity, and yet when others disagree with us or disregard our opinion, we take it personally.

The stronger our belief system, the more difficult it is for us to look beyond our own perspective and treat other people's ideas worthy of consideration. Being stuck in right vs wrong can cause us to feel emotionally stressed out, prevent us from expressing our own ideas with the right frame of mind, and ignore what others have to say.

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How to Start With Evidence-Based Management?

From my experience and observations, my concern is weak understanding that the Evidence-Based Management (EBM) framework is empirical. It requires transparency, frequent inspection, and adaptation. Some organizations proceed with the initial evaluation and then drop the idea. Measuring once and making some decisions is not enough! No promises that this would work.

Measuring often, regularly, making decisions, adapting frequently towards a meaningful goal. This is the secret ingredient of the powerful framework. Like Scrum, EBM is simple to understand, difficult to master. Once you experience it, implement it in your organization, you should see significant results.

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Making Safe Choices When Opting for Open Source in Your Business

Despite the popularity of OS software, one developer argues why open source could not be safe for your business.

Whether you are looking for a document management system or a development framework for your next business application, you might be considering open-source solutions. However, making the right choice that meets your requirements doesn't necessarily mean it's a safe choice.

Imagine a company is using a system (could be an ERP, CRM, DMS, ESB — the list goes on) for a couple of years, and that system relies on an open-source framework for that one day, for whatever reason, stops receiving maintenance updates, and the next version will be released under a different open-source license with more restrictions.

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When Not to Switch a Programming Language

This developer's conundrum: "Should I realy change programming languages at this point in the project?"

At one point in almost every developer's career, there is work to be done with an "inherited" project. What this means is you are handed the responsibility of maintaining, improving, and adding features to a project that had many, many decisions and collaborations cooked into it. 

I will be talking about one aspect of this, one which keeps me scratching my bald head: When should I choose to use a different programming language? 

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The Best Decision: Your Future and Serverless Stream Processing

About a year ago, we started being a part of a digital transformation with the first ever cloud-based IDE for serverless development. It was no cakewalk—we’ve been burning the candle at both ends trying to cover a majority from the AWS’s serverless stack. Working with AWS Kinesis made me realize the beauty of serverless—of course, the exposure to streaming data with Kafka spared me some time going through the rudiments.

Decisions based on logic: Robert Anasch on UnsplashDecisions based on logic: Robert Anasch on Unsplash

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Java Switch Statement

Switch statement in Java is for decision making. Unlike if-then and if-then-else statements, the switch statement can have a number of possible execution paths.

Syntax

The general form of a switch statement is:

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A Rapid Introduction to Decision Model Notation

To those who are familiar with the OASIS WS-BPEL standard, Decision Model Notation should not be difficult to process. Here is a rapid, intuitive introduction to this notation.

The following infographic attempts to capture the essence of Decision Model Notation as depicted here: