Tag: data analysis

Imagine a perfect world? I have an AI agent that knows my business well. It’s getting real time input from sales, from customers, it makes amazing decisions. We get a large order? We need to ramp up production of our widgets. We have an order pipeline of xx widgets and we know over time that yy% will close. Let’s place a larger order with a supplier overseas.

The next day, we have an election and tariffs are announced on imported parts. We react immediately, cancel the order, start the process to expand a local factory. We place ads to hire workers and order equipment. Things are looking good for our business and our factory will be up and running in a few months.

The next week we find out the tariffs weren’t really being enforced, so they’re paused. Our AI agent re-places our large order for imported parts and tried to cancel the factory expansion. Of course, it calculates the costs of both sides before deciding, and perhaps consults with me on other uses of our local factory.

How many times can we do this? Or rather, how many times would we let an AI agent keep adjusting our business?

To be fair, humans might do the same thing and over-react, but mostly we become hesitant with unexpected news. That slowness can be an asset. We often need time to think and come to a decision. Lots of our decisions aren’t always based on hard facts, and a lot of business isn’t necessarily fact driven either. We often put our thumb on the scales when making decisions because there isn’t a clear path based on just data.

Things can get worse when we collaborate. I used to run real-time reports for an importing company, and we found that executives would print a report, get busy, and after minutes (or hours), discuss the report with someone in a department. However, their numbers rarely matched because the reports were printed at different times. At first they lost trust in the system because the same report on the same day had different numbers. Even when we added a “print” or an “as of” time, the reports were too annoying to users to be helpful because the numbers didn’t match.

Real time isn’t what most of us want. Except in the Olympics. There we want the photo finish right away.

But not in all sports. A review is good. In the NFL, I’ve come to like instant reply. It’s gotten better/faster and often gives us the right answer. Not always, but often. It’s better, arguably, then just real-time humans.

Real-time decisions and reactions can be good in some cases. Adjusting machinery, vehicles, electricity, etc. where we need too-quick-for-humans decisions based on data is a good place for real time data. Lots of business decisions we make aren’t the places where we really need real-time insights. Our human brains just don’t work that fast.

Steve Jones

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I was studying for the DP-900 exam recently and in one of the Microsoft resources, I ran across this quote: “Historical data is equally important, to give a business a more stabilized view of trends in performance.” This was in context of looking at database performance, but it would apply to any part of your business.

The world has changed dramatically in the last two years. In early 2020, at this point, I was finalizing work and getting ready for a sabbatical from work. I managed to get the last sabbatical before the world shut down and most people didn’t see the value of one during a pandemic. I returned from sabbatical, with a trip planned to the UK in early March that I canceled. Since that time, I can’t imagine the quote above applies to the airlines’ business. I’ve flown a bit across the last year, but rarely for work. I suspect most of their models and ideas about how to manage their business had to dramatically change.

Is that quote still applicable to your business? I wonder how many businesses have started to see new trends and needed to abandon some amount of historical data from their charts and graphs. If that’s the case, then is it worth archiving some of that data away, rather than needing to keep it in an online database? Do reports need beginning default dates that start sometime after the pandemic affected the world? Interesting questions.

For most of us, we don’t necessarily worry about a lot of business impacts. We’ll adjust to what the business analysts ask us to do. However, I wonder if the way you approach your job has changed? For DBAs, have you reset your baseline for how the performance of your systems ought to look during normal times?

For software developers, many of you are working remotely, so how do you approach work and coordination with others, has that changed? Do you need more or less lead time to work with others and get code tested and deployed? I know many developers have found work during the pandemic, especially remote, to be more enjoyable.

Lots of things in the world changed, but much of our work continues on the same path. Approaching things with the idea of adapting to change, but using the past as a guide is what has worked well for me. I have strong opinions on how I work and live, but I adapt when there’s a need or evidence to support changes.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Stitcher, Spotify, or iTunes.