Kim Warren on Strategy
Strategy insights and living business models
Big Data needs architecture
SD models offer a rigorous enterprise architecture for firms’ data. Pharmaceuticals firms are blessed with huge amounts of data on just about everything. But a competitive war-gaming project just completed for one of the big players was surprising. Sure, we could get data on things needed to model the firm and its rivals, but this seemed to come from lots of different sources, in many different forms – mostly big spreadsheets and slide-decks.
The data was inconsistent in units and time-scales – some was weekly going back >5 years, some monthly for the last 2, 3 or 4 years and others [especially the financials] quarterly or annual [last year: this year: %+/- ]. The data also lacked any sense of “what causes what” – What has the varying number of sales reps calling on doctors over the last 4 years done to the number of doctors starting to, or ceasing to, prescribe our product? … This raises 2 questions:
- Just how much value are firms going to get from mining their Big Data if it has these problems?
- How much better could they do if their data-collection and analysis was informed by the rigorous structure of a properly-built system dynamics model?
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