You Can’t Handle the Truth
By Mike Shultz, Infoglide Software CEO
We have a new Congress and a new House majority leader as of this week’s swearing in ceremony. The current House majority party (R) plans to pass a bill to repeal the “Obamacare” bill passed during the last session by the former House majority party (D). Both parties make “fact based” arguments about why killing or keeping the bill will reduce the deficit, yet both can’t be right.
This isn’t a political blog, and I’m not going to take a side on this issue. What struck me is how often we use “facts” to bolster our argument, with “facts” defined as any real data that can be massaged or misinterpreted to suggest that our desired outcome appears to be the best one. Actual data is often plentiful but our preference for one alternative keeps us from embracing and promoting reality.
So mishandling the truth when you have all the facts you need is a conscious action. What happens when you think you have the data needed to make a rational decision but you aren’t conscious of important information that could totally change your perception? For example, we may have access to what look like sufficient pieces of information to reach a rational business decision, such as a driver’s license with a photo ID or a computed credit score based on the person’s history of business transactions.
However, what’s often missing from the decision process is knowledge about relationships between people. Understanding these relationships – who’s who, who knows who, and other non-obvious connections – can increase beneficial decisions in a colossal way, yet awareness of these relationships is rarely incorporated into the process.
Since entity resolution can increase the accuracy of business processes by an order of magnitude, our New Year’s resolution here at Infoglide is to introduce as many people as possible to its benefits.
Happy New Year!
