Using data to make decisions
From PLN
Using data to make decisions
by Leslie Dillon, from Leader's Digest October 2006
An article in the October 9 BusinessWeek online talks about how Yahoo! redesigned its homepage based on data from its users’ clicks, instead of on its hunches. Yahoo! invited one of the authors of Hard Facts: Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management to speak to their staff. The book takes its theme from evidence-based medicine, where “doctors use recent clinical research to inform their decisions.” “The approach requires managers to base decisions on facts rather than opinions,” and as author Jeff Pfeiffer says, “It’s this attitude that instead of sting around having debates about what will work and what won’t, let’s run some experiments and learn.”
One thing Yahoo! staff learned was that “what people say they want isn’t always what they actually click on,” and that “small changes can make a big difference”.
I’m reminded of one of Stephen Abram’s talks at ALA where he told of a library branch that had story hour every Wednesday at 10:00 am. But attendance was abysmal. Staff hadn’t checked local demographics to learn that most of the mothers in that neighborhood worked during the day!
Thankfully though, some libraries do make their decisions--both large and small--based on data.
Michigan State University Libraries used data from its internal reference blog to support changing how it staffed its information and reference desks. (See the article in the October 1 Library Journal.)
St Paul Public Library’s strategic planning (described in the October 1 LJ) initiative spent eight months gathering and analyzing lots of “hard” data, including Census information for the individual SPPL service areas and information on past strategic plans and annual operation reports; the depth and diversity of library collections; patron usage, cumulatively and by location; current staffing and trends; technology systems; budgets and finances; and administrative and organizational structure.
Library Hi Tech (v. 24, n. 3, 2006) has an article(subscription/purchase required) advocating evidence-based librarianship. From the abstract:
- Librarians need to increase their reliance on sound evidence to support their programs and services. They also need to become more active in producing and publishing evidence for their peers and others outside the profession.
Once you start using data, testing needs to follow. At Yahoo! “there’s always some test running.” Testing’s now part of its DNA!
