If there's a great story coming out of the recent presidential election, it's how analytical, evidence-based methods are disrupting the conventional wisdom of political pundits and campaigns to deliver significantly more reliable forecasts and actionable insights.
The most visible story is around Nate Silver, the controversial former baseball statistician-turned political prognosticator whose FiveThirtyEight blog is published by the New York Times. Silver developed a statistical model that uses data to reject conventional political wisdom about what factors are important in an electoral race and accurately forecast election results. His predictions heading into the 2012 presidential race caused an uproar among pundits who denounced him as "a joke," a "one-term celebrity" "running a numbers racket," whose forecasts were "getting into silly land." For this year's presidential election, Silver's approach has been vindicated -accurately predicting the outcome in all fifty states and turning political journalism on its head.
Even more interesting than punditry, however, is how these data-based analytical methods are delivering impressive results for political campaigns. Time Magazine published a fascinating article this week about the Obama campaign's use of sophisticated data mining and analysis methods to not only drive an astonishing $1 billion in fundraising but also informed many other campaign activities such as election simulation, campaign ad-buying, and get-out-the-vote efforts.
One of the insights in the article was that President Obama's earlier2008 campaign had been unable to merge the data from their fundraising and voter databases, preventing them from having a complete picture of their support base.
“We analyzed very early that the problem in Democratic politics was you had databases all over the place,” said one of the officials. “None of them talked to each other.” So over the first 18 months, the campaign started over, creating a single massive system that could merge the information collected from pollsters, fundraisers, field workers and consumer databases as well as social-media and mobile contacts with the main Democratic voter files in the swing states."
They also brought in an analytics team five times the size of the previous campaign. As anyone familiar with information technology can attest, the above implies that the Obama campaign thought about the data that they wanted to measure, built a standard model by which the data could be integrated across a wide array of databases, applications, websites, mobile devices, stored in a data warehouse
where it could be mined for rich insights that served the campaign over and over again.
The notion that data has value is not a novel concept. That statement is obvious to most people in IT and business. I bring up this story of data-driven disruption to drive home the point that so many organizations pay no more than lip service to this concept. They make movements towards trying to clean up their data, trying to create governance, but at the end of the day, fail because they lack the resolve and commitment to make data a priority. I've seen this play out repeatedly in many organizations.
Too few global corporations insist upon and drive global consistency in their data models to break down the silo'd organizations, systems, and processes. Too few business organizations prioritize stewardship and the data cleanliness that would make that data useful for broader analytic purposes beyond basic operational reporting. Too many IT organizations focus on the technology component of their name, ignoring the information side. I think IT organizations and enterprise architects – especially those that want to be seen as a value-added partner instead of a cost center – need to transform themselves into advocates for stronger information management.
The story of Nate Silver, the Obama Campaign, and Billy Beane in baseball is about having an understanding and appreciation that it is the information that is an organization's most critical asset that needs investment and caring. Prioritizing that investment above all others helps to unlock the valuable insights about market levers, customer behaviors, actionable operational improvements, and accurate performance forecasting. And win elections.
