Scott Berkun, the author of The Art of Project Management just blogged about the data death spiral:

Whenever data is misused as the only means for making decisions, a death spiral begins. The lust for data overwhelms all sensibilities. Cowardly decision makers howl in glee at reams of unnecessary data, while bright people sit handcuffed to ugly slidedecks and mediocre ideas. Decision makers forget their brains and wait for numbers, fueling an organizational addiction to unnecessary and distracting data.

What I like about Berkun’s writing (I’ve been flipping through his book) is that he makes claims like the one above, then gives examples. Sadly, the examples often sound too familiar. Here are two of his four examples for the above:

• No opinions are considered without data. Opinions are good if they come from smart thoughtful experts. If you are in a world where you, as an expert, can’t make obvious improvements without 10 pages of supporting material, guess what happens? Nothing happens. People spend all their time defending the obvious and the scale of work, and the energy to improve, drops dramatically.

• Creatives are hiding in the corner. (Good) Designers and other creative people know how to make things. Lots of things. They experiment and explore. When used properly they are a piston of progress. But if the landscape is data and analysis obsessed, creative types are relegated to refinement work, the least leveraged use of their talents. The team gets a fraction of their possible value.

Fortunately, he also offers solutions, including the suggestions that “instincts matter”, “people are better than data”, and consensus leads to group think. Most importantly, however, is the following:

• Let go of the fear. Many people collect data to defend their choices should things go wrong. When bad things happen they point to the data and say “See! We did the right thing!” despite the results. This kind of paranoid, self-protective thinking weighs on a team: instead of ensuring success, people are protecting their asses. Most of us can smell it when a leader is in this mode and it puts the entire project on its heels. Insurance is for the birds: A good manager earns the trust of his team and lets them know that even in failure, he’ll take responsibility for what was done.

tags: art of project management, bad decisions, bright people, creative, creative people, creative types, creatives, death, death spiral, group think, guess, handcuffed, howl, instincts, scott berkun, sensibilities, supporting material, unnecessary data

Way back in April 1997, Jakob Nielsen tried to educate us on Zipf Distributions and the power law, and their relationship to the web. This is where discussions of the Chris Anderson’s Long Tail start, but the emphasis is on the whole picture, not just the many economic opportunities at the end of the tail.

Here’s how it works with hits to websites:

• a few sites become popular and form the “big head” at the left
• a few more sites form the slope
• a huge number of websites score very low and form the “long tail”

Nielsen adds these examples:

• a language has a few words (“the”, “and”, etc.) that are used extremely often, and a library has a few books that everybody wants to borrow (current bestsellers)
• a language has quite a lot of words (“dog”, “house”, etc.) that are used relatively much, and a library has a good number of books that many people want to borrow (crime novels and such)
• a language has an abundance of words (“Zipf”, “double-logarithmic”, etc.) that are almost never used, and a library has piles and piles of books that are only checked out every few years (reference manuals for Apple II word processors, etc.)

But the point here is about Google (or Yahoo, etc.) search results ranking, which puts enormous value in the number of incoming links to a page. It turns out that these links also follow a power-law distribution and it not uncommon to find complaints that Google’s Page Rank recognizes popularity over other factors.

So it’s worth wondering: is popularity bad? Are popularity and quality mutually exclusive? Do search rankings represent some sort of global group-think?

Now put this in an academic library context and consider a student Googling for background for a research paper (think University freshmen the night before it’s due). Is it possible that linking patterns work like Wikipedia and tend to favor quality, or do they simply represent lowest common denominator popularity. Do search results reflect the sum of our altruistic linking intentions or our base crudity?

More about search ranking and libraries:

• Findability, The Google Economy, and Libraries
• The Google Economy Vs. Libraries
• Changing Modes Of Communication
• The Google Economy Will Beat You With A Stick

tags: academia, academic library, google, google economy, googling, group think, jakob nielsen, libraries, library, lowest common denominator, networked information, popularity, quality, research, search engines, search rankings, search result rankings, search results, wikipedia