The World Didn’t Change. The Way We Measure It Has.

Looking For Your Feedback

A few weeks ago I quoted Seth Godin on the challenge of creating good and reliable metics for success:

“We keep coming up with new things to measure (like processor speed, heat output, column inches) but it's pretty rare that those measurements are actually a proxy for the impact or quality we care about.” ~ Seth Godin

In this context, he along with a few other pundits observed the challenge with mobile phone vendors quoting the size of phone batteries as a reliable metric to measure device up-time. At the same time, Apple has switched to up-time from a full charge as a more reliable and relevant metric for the iPhone.

Example: Measuring Battery Life

Exceptional battery life and all-day performance now replace 3,500mA on the specification sheets. Some more technical folks may claim this is just marketing, but it’s clear that battery performance will be measured by a consumer in a different manner than the size of the battery. Just as importantly, device manufacturers can impact device availability in numerous ways beyond simply including a larger battery.

In the coming weeks we will explore some new concepts in enterprise data creation and collection. We will look at the richness of the enterprise digital footprint and explore some ways in which this works in business’ favor and detriment in speed time-to-insight, time-to-decision, and, perhaps more critically, in time-to-communication within the business structure.

These are issues that affect all decisions, whether they’re the strategic, operational, or tactical as defined by Carl Spetzler in his article The Decision Making Continuum.

AI Will Only Makes It Worse

While we’re excited about the prospects of AI across business and personal productivity, we have to be careful what we wish for. The power of generative AI will have a profound effect on what and how we measure the world around us. It will change the world in positive and negative ways, some of which we cannot even guess. But it will also profoundly change the things and the manner in which we measure effectiveness, impact, education, wealth (which we’ve already unfortunately seen), among other things.

“When I was studying molecular genetics and aerospace engineering at MIT in the early 1980s, the number of confirmed planets outside our solar system was zero. Today NASA’s count is past 6,000, and the Kepler data says the Milky Way holds more planets than stars (and the NASA Roman Space Telescope will increase these numbers somewhere between 1,000X and 1,000,000 fold). Nothing about the galaxy changed. Our instruments did.”  ~Peter Diamandis

Chime In

My hope is that this short blog scratches an itch that many of you in the data science field have had; that you’ve seen this in practice.

Please share in the comments below or in direct messages in the DecideWise community on the ways in which you’ve seen the playing field change and shift. The things that were important yesterday are completely different today are endless and unless we start a dialogue today we will all be caught unprepared tomorrow.

What generational shifts are occurring now in your businesses that powered by AI would have been considered impossible just a few short years ago?

Please let us know!