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You may think that you have usable information…
...but, you don’t have it and you probably can’t get it.
We explore the importance of understanding the right data and where to get it from.
We explore the importance of understanding the right data and where to get it from.
There is an intuitive and perpetual myth that organizations will get better data over time and be able to make better decisions. It started in the 1960’s with the development of reliability analysis and lives on getting stronger by the day. One or two people who really know a thing or two about the subject have explained the problem. Howard L Resnikoff (The famous Resnikoff conundrum) in his paper Mathematical Aspects of Reliability-Centered Maintenance published in 1978 says this in his introduction about the availability of data in the real world:
- One of the most important contributions of the Reliability-Centered Maintenance Program is its explicit recognition that certain types of information heretofore actively sought as a product of maintenance activities are, in principle, as well as in practice, unobtainable.
- The more effective the [existing maintenance] program is, the fewer critical failures will occur, and correspondingly less information about operational failures will be available to the maintenance policy designer.
- That the optimal policy must be designed in the absence of critical failure information, utilizing only the results of component tests and prior experience with related but different complex systems, is an apparently paradoxical situation.
- Moreover, the applicability of statistical theories of reliability to the very small populations of large-scale complex systems typically encountered in practice is questionable and calls for some discussion.
- Each of these distinct viewpoints leads to the conclusion that maintenance policy design is necessarily conducted with extremely limited information of dubious reproducibility, and we must consider why it is nevertheless possible, and how it can be done.”
David Smith in his book, Reliability Maintainability and Risk (2005), had this to say.
“The validity of repeatable component failures has become controversial. The extremely wide variability of failure rates of allegedly identical components under supposedly identical operating and environmental conditions is now acknowledged.”
This is at a component level. At the equipment and system level in an operational environment with human factors involved the variability and potential failure modes increase exponentially.
We have probably always known this (if we think hard enough about it), but it is incredibly difficult to get the wider organization to recognize it. Especially when there are plenty of organizations selling IT solutions that collect and analyze data in order to provide autonomous ‘information driven’ decision making.
Don’t get us wrong, data has its place, but we recommend organizations take a blended approach. The organizational knowledge embedded in the workforce is the most underrated and underused information resource, that you are already paying for. The trick is to know how to exploit it effectively for decision-making. Asking the right questions is where we start. Contact us now to find how we can help decision-making in your organization.
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The Woodhouse Partnership joins the RSK Group
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