The Decision Strategist

Technology is really about information, and our ability to interact and store information has been making some major changes for the past several decades.

Those of us who are researchers have been blessed in the past several years with an explosion of available information for examining nearly every topic we want to look at.

But at the same time, there has been a shift away from objective analysis toward studies completed by organizations with a vested interest in the outcome.

This has resulted, as noted at Overcoming Bias, in a crisis of faith in the use of statistics. No one believes any numbers that are released because they figure that the people who did the analysis have a hidden agenda. This is the most demoralizing aspect of being an analyst.

The problem is essentially that the analysis process is still closed. We don’t trust the numbers because we don’t know the process that went into obtaining them. Until the process of analysis is opened to a public that can understand and take part in a dialog about the methods, we can continue to write analytical work off as a waste of money and resources because someone else will always have a study saying the opposite.

We need the democratization of data analysis.

And I have high hopes for the future. One of my ideas has been to create an online data warehouse and analysis website, and a few groups such as Swivel and Many Eyes are doing just that.

The services are still fledgling, but in a fairly short time I think we’ll see the ability to perform analysis via the web, and to upload and share data. Hopefully this will result in the standardization of data sets and eliminate the monkey work of downloading a text file and formating it in excel.

I cry when I think how many people have done the very same thing with the very same data.

For a time there will be a lot of confusion, attacks, and some really bad work, but ultimately a community of devoted analysts performing essentially open and peer reviewed work will develop. Because it’s been through trial by fire from all sides of the issue, it will be the most objective approach to messy data analysis that we have ever obtained.

The new analytical hotshots will be the people who have weight with communities at Swivel and Many Eyes and others and are known for doing quality work. These people will engage in very public analysis and will be extremely valuable to everyone wanting analysis that can be seen as objective.

Hopefully that means that shoddy and lazy work will slip to the sides and we can regain confidence in numbers that we see.

I guess it could go the other way. That people don’t want objective analysis and we’ll shun those whose results we can’t know ahead of time. We’ll see even more extreme partisanship.

But that way lies certain death.

-zot, pretending to be a futurist.

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This post kicks off a weekly post discussing new decision making techniques that I haven’t talked about yet. This weeks technique is pareto analysis. pareto analysis is a simple process that consists of listing all the changes you are considering making, and raking them according to some applicable scale. I used it this last weekend to look at how much time I was spending here on The Decision Strategist, and whether I should reallocate some effort to other aspects of the site.

There are a million things to do when starting a new blog. There is the design of the site, generating interesting content, getting to word out, considering advertising and affiliate programs, tracking and analysis, and so on. At times it seems overwhelming, and there are entire blogs out there that cover the process.

There is a post at ProBlogger (sorry, I can’t find the exact article) that discusses the importance of not focusing too heavily on one aspect of your blog. I’m also a fan of ClearBlogging, among others.

I decided I needed to evaluate how I was spending my time, and here is an example of pareto analysis that I used to do so.

Pareto Analysis

Pareto analysis that can be used to prioritize a list of tasks or changes based on a score. First make a list of all your options, then rank the list according to a metric that makes sense. I should have done this when I was starting the blog, but I suppose it’s better late then never. Here is my list:

• Design
• Advertising
• Generating Interesting Content
• Tracking
• Marketing
• Reading Blog Advice Blogs
• Differentiating From and/or Copying The Competition

The key to getting something useful from pareto analysis is to use the right measurement to rank your options. My goal at this point is to increase the number of readers, so I’m going to rank things differently than someone who might be looking for ways to freshen up their blog. Unfortunately, I don’t have any knowledge of how the options I listed above actually help readership, so my ranking will be subjective (on a scale from 0 to 5).

• Design (1)
• Advertising (0)
• Generating Interesting Content (5)
• Tracking (2)
• Marketing (4)
• Reading Blogging Advice (2)
• Differentiating From and/or Copying The Competition (3)

I should have said that my goal is to gain and retain readers over the long term. Getting new readers in the short term is probably only dependent on the extent to which I submit my posts to social news sites, comment on other blogs, and market. Getting and retaining readers in the long term has something to do with all of the things on my list. Here is the list reordered by importance.

1. Generating Interesting Content
2. Marketing
3. Differentiating From and/or Copying The Competition
4. Reading Blogging Advice
5. Tracking
6. Design
7. Advertising

Here’s why I ranked these the way I did:

Advertising (0)

I mean advertising for other sites as a means of revenue generation, not advertising my site. I gave advertising a 0 because not only does it not bring anyone to my site, but, if done poorly, it could make people never come back.

Design (1)

Maybe design deserves a higher score than 1. I figure though that the default wordpress theme is good enough not to drive any readers away, and any changes will not make much difference unless you build a very distinctive look.

Tracking (2)

I don’t know that tracking is very useful in keeping readers, but it does tell you where they are coming from, which helps you assess the worth of different methods of getting people to come to your sight.

Reading Blogging Advice (2)

This is another one that possibly should be more highly ranked. I guess most of what I do in the marketing section is based off of what I read. But after you have some basic knowledge, I’m not sure that it contributes too much, though it’s probably important just to keep up with new ideas.

Differentiating From and/or Copying The Competition (3)

I haven’t found many blogs dealing with decision making, which means either no one is interested, or everyone has kept it in the fairly useless abstract realm. I guess we’ll find out. This is useful for generating ideas and stuff, but isn’t going to do much if you don’t have content.

Marketing (4)

By marketing I mean submitting your posts to Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and other news and networking sites. This seems really important to me because it takes a while to make it up on the search engine rankings, and you need a way of getting readers when your blog is young.

Generating Interesting Content (5)

I know there are different philosophies on this, but I think that if you are looking to create a long term project that will be relevant and useful to people, you have to have good content. And I don’t just mean content that is maximized for SEO, I mean content that people will find interesting and useful in their lives. Without that, I don’t think the site will ever have a high number of readers. I just hope I can live up to the goal.

So How Have I Been Doing?

Turns out I’ve been focused somewhat differently than my list suggests. Here is how I’ve been spending my time so far:

1. Design
2. Reading Blogging Advice
3. Generating Interesting Content
4. Marketing
5. Tracking
6. Differentiating From and/or Copying The Competition
7. Advertising

Apparently I’ve gotten a little too caught up in the eye-candy. Some of this may also be due to my learning how to set up the whole blogging system, and to my delight in playing with different color themes, and just having a lot of information to assimilate. But I feel like this weekend I reached a point where I am finally happy with the way my site looks, so now I can focus on the main priority of generating content.

Think I missed anything or would you have ranked things differently? Leave a comment! How do you decide what aspect of your blog to focus on?

-zot

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