Mobile Data Has the Answers, But First, We Need to Ask the Right Questions

HOW TWO SOCIAL ENTERPRISES ARE USING MOBILE DATA AND ANALYTICS TO TRANSFORM THEIR BUSINESS

While I worked at Amazon, a running joke was that no employee could sneeze without first performing data analysis. In reality, that’s how the company actually functioned; every decision had to be supported by data that included testing, validating and improving a current system.

When I made a career change to focus on economically developing and emerging contexts, I had to reorient my thinking, as decision-making in these contexts often happens without analyzing data. Over the past 13 years, I have been working to change that approach. However, I’ve realized that when guiding social enterprises, nonprofits and international NGOs to begin using data, it’s helpful to focus on a key, sometimes obvious point: data should actually answer a critical business or programmatic question. Mobile data collection for the sake of collecting data isn’t enough. That’s why at TaroWorks, we focus on making analytics easier.

To read the entire piece which appeared in Next Billion, click here