Читать книгу AI-Enabled Analytics for Business - Lawrence S. Maisel - Страница 14

Most planning, budgeting, and forecasting are biased: that is, a value for the future that is based on a human's guess. While the guess may be from experience or gut feel, it is a value that is not mathematically calculated from past performance of the business. Biased forecasts are always fraught with human frailties because, as mentioned, they are about what we want or need the future to be. How many times have you made a spreadsheet and not liked the outcome displayed? Hardly ever, for most of us—we simply change the values and, voilà, get what we want. Biased decision-making will be explored further in Chapter 2.

Many sales teams pronounce their “forecasts” with immense certitude by claiming the forecast is from the CRM system. The importance of the CRM is to establish the credentials of the source, like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval. It is authority, credibility, and accuracy all rolled into one. But—and this is a big but—the forecast is merely the sales rep's guess of when the deal will close.

A company typically establishes a ranking system for where a sales deal is in the pipeline and its probability to close, but as disciplined as this ranking may be, it is not “analytics”—that is, it is not derived from the application of mathematics on data. The fact the sales rep enters the “forecast” into the CRM does not transform it to anything beyond a guess.

While sales reps are often good guessers, they achieve many of their forecasts, especially at the end of a quarter, through a modicum of “unnatural” acts that have deep discounts and concessions the business pays for in reduced profitability down the road.

Analytics provides unbiased intelligence that is an essential input into decisions, as the mathematics of analytics is dispassionate. Formulas have no predisposition to a desired outcome. Data about the past is historical. As such, the combination of math and history yields a view to what the future can be vs. what one wants the future to be.

Business needs human intuition, as we have a good sense of what is around us, but we are biased about what is ahead of us. As such, when looking forward, there is a fundamental need to incorporate unbiased predictions and forecasts that can be gained from analytics. When the two are combined, the man-and-machine efforts produce higher accuracy predictions over a longer time horizon.