Abstract
“Data-driven management” is a popular catchphrase, but it is nonsense. Data is a raw material and it should not drive anything. Before data can be useful it must be converted into knowledge.
Patterns and relationships must be identified within the data, and tested. There are many ways to do this: some simple, and some complex. In this chapter we point out some of the pitfalls of an overly simplistic approach. We explore how “average” values can conceal important information and how data “curation” (the process of selecting which data to analyze) may have different requirements depending upon how the data is to be used.
“Everything is number”
Pythagoras
“If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything”
Darrell Huff, “How to Lie with Statistics” [1]
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References
Huff D. How to lie with statistics. New York: W. W. Norton & Company; 1993.
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Loving VA, Ellis RL, Steele JR, Schomer DF, Schoemaker S. Time is not on our side: how radiology practices should manage customer queues. J Am Coll Radiol. 2017;14(11):1481–8.
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Rosenthal, D., Pianykh, O. (2021). A Word About Numbers. In: Efficient Radiology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53610-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53610-7_1
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