Analysis done at eBay shows that its ads at several search engines are useless and its marketing team has wasted millions of dollars over the years. This is arising out of a culture of advocacy.

In the preceding years, business decisions were much driven by senior managers’ advocacy and ideas but relied less on objective data. Thus, business always made wrong decisions and experienced risks and instability which resulted in enormous loss and even irreversible results. The eBay example indeed verified this. Marketing people and managers believe that the ads on search agents could somehow increase the customer volume visiting their homepage, however, the result turns out to be unworkable.

Thanks to the development of technology, companies are able to collect not only primary data that obtained form communication and observation that done by the firm or other agents for current purposes but also can search for secondary data that done previously and were collected for other purpose. Actually, when making a decision, secondary data comes the first and then should be firm searching for supplemented primary data. This decision making process reflects a culture of evidence: decision making lay more emphasis on data evidence rather than advocacy held by senior managers.

A culture of evidence could minimum risks or even eliminate it with the help of perfect information. As a consequence, people have ability to obtain more data were awarded more and treated better. This also provides an incentive for the employees to worker harder. Overall, a culture of evidence around data could improve firm’s efficiently and pave the way to success.

News found on :
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/careers/leadership-lab/are-you-letting-data-drive-your-decisions/article20836228/