Metrics
Data ... Meaningful Data that Matters

Some of the reasons why Peter Burgess is passionate about data, and how powerful it can be.

Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Some of the reasons why Peter Burgess is passionate about data, and how powerful it can be

I have always thought that knowledge is important. A school near where I lived for a long time in Manhattan had the inscription over its main doorway 'Knowlege is Power - Francis Bacon', and I think that reinforced my belief in the importance of knowledge.

When I was a corporate CFO, a big part of my job was to provide knowledge about the performance of the company to all the decision makers in the company. A big part of this was in the form of financial information, but a lot of it was to do with matching what I knew from understanding the accountants, and what the various decision makers knew because they were experts in their own specialities.

I made this observation back in the 1980s at the height of the Sahel drought:

'The fact that I do not know something. does not mean it is not known'

This interaction had an impression on me because I was faced with the problem of doing analysis and recommendation about important matters in the region, and I was expected to use the available data that the 'international experts' had familiarity with. A good part of these data were studies made by international experts during a short duration trip to the region, and random collection of data from 'official' sources and prior expert reports. I stress the word random, because this was random as in chaotic rather than the scientific random used in rigorous statistical analysis.

I had an experience in Lesotho about a year later. Our assignment was to do analysis of the agriculture sector, and especially its institutions to make recommendations about strengthening the sector. Our team was specifically instucted not to do field work because much study had already been done, and there should be no more need for data collection. We were assigned an office and someone had already collected the prior studies on the subject. Neatly stacked along the wall was a pile of reports some three feet high and more than ten feet long.

I have observed many times over the years that this stack represented many millions of dollars of international expert consultancy fees, yet the value realized from this work was negligable.

The value of data is realized when it is used. The big cost of data is incurred when it is being collected.

These anecdotes from more than 30 years ago suggest to me that we can use the power of modern technology to use available data in a more effective way. Consultants ... international experts ... still collect data, do analysis and write reports, and for the most part rather little is done with all of this after the initial flurry of publishing the report. Some of these data should be incorporated in a system of 'Big Data' so that there is an increment to the pool of knowledge that is available to inform our analysis and planning, and also to enable holding the various actors in the economy and society accountable for their decisions and behavior.

Based on this, part of the architecture of TrueValueMetrics is to enable an easy dataflow of data that are going to be used in a single study to flow also into a Big Data datastore. What this will do is to start to balance the asymmetry between what performance data are available in the corporate organization with what are available in the community.

We can all see what is going on in our community ... the place where we live and the place where we work. Some of what we see is stuff that is not being accounted for by the corporate organization or anyone else. This can be changed.

• Every NGO that collects data and writes a report should let the data flow into the TVM Social Impact Datastore
• Every owner of a smart phone should feed data into the datastore ... specifically data about an economic activity in the community that is doing good or doing bad.