DETROIT ARSENAL, Mich. – From the moment we wake up, our lives are defined by numbers: the weather, the time we set our alarm, the number of emails and Teams messages begging for our attention before we even sit in our seat.
We spend our days looking earnestly at a number on a clock that decides when we must work, and when we can be free to enjoy what we truly love in life. Likes on a post, due dates for pregnancy, the number of items that roll off an assembly line in a day, dollars in our bank account, interest accruing on our debts – numbers, perhaps, are one of the few things so consistent to the human experience that Benjamin Franklin might have decided to rank them alongside such constants as “death and taxes.”
Therefore, numbers are not so precious in their quantity, but in their quality. How do we decide which numbers truly mean something to us, and which mean nothing at all?
It’s true that numbers don’t lie, but trusting in the wrong numbers – in the wrong way – yields half-truths. The question for us is therefore not if numbers have value to our lives, but which numbers – and why?
Insert Dr. Mary Isrow, U.S. Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command chief data and analytics officer, and enthusiastic new mother.
“There’s an inordinate amount of data out there,” said Isrow, “there’s PowerPoints, spreadsheets, dashboards and so much more.” The difficulty is not so much in finding data as it is “cutting through the noise” of near-limitless quantities of data to find information that makes decision making possible.
“All the noise of data – the fine little datapoints each trying to constantly get our attention – distracts us from what’s relevant,” says Isrow. “The point of collecting data is to produce analytics that we can actually work with to make data-driven, reality-based decisions that drive change.”
That kind of measurable change, as she points out, is the goal of professionals like her and her team. She notes that producing and visualizing that kind of positive change for organizations like TACOM is a key part to proving that the resources required to collect and review organizational data result in increased Soldier readiness throughout the Army.
As TACOM’s chief data and analytics officer, Isrow oversees a team of dedicated, mostly younger employees that finds innovative solutions for some of the Army’s Organic Industrial Base’s toughest and most complex problems. Her team of “hard-working, fresh-out-of-college, smart and ambitious” data and analytics professionals are tackling longstanding challenges within Army logistics that historically have been both costly and unavoidable.
The results her team have produced include award-winning dashboards that now automate, digest and simplify mountains of data from Bills of Material – documents that list all the parts needed to build or repair a vehicle, down to a single screw. Previously, all this data would have been processed and interpreted by hand. The data is now automatically input into a single dashboard that is used by Army leaders to make quick and informed decisions at a glance. The dashboard has saved taxpayers more than $480,700 over the last three years, with an 86% reduction in manual labor and increased visibility into more than 5,000 BOMs. For this one dashboard alone, Isrow and the TACOM data and analytics team received the U.S. Army Materiel Command Best Power BI Visualization award in July at the AMC Data and Analytics Summit. But the accolades didn’t stop there.
Isrow’s team also received the Army’s Best Non-Power BI Analytics award for its Operational Readiness Program Automated Report, which automatically provides slides detailing analytics associated with aspects of Army readiness for brigades participating in the TACOM ORP initiative prior to their deployment. The automated reports drastically reduced the resources needed to generate the reports – from 50 hours per week to just 30 minutes, and $748,500 saved over three years – and helped Army logistics leaders understand the logistical pain points for units preparing to deploy.
Tools like these continue to be developed to help Army leaders understand logistical problems and what’s needed to fix them. But leaders are people. Just like we can get overwhelmed with due dates, financial concerns, wake-up times, kids’ practice schedules and more, the temptation is to let the sum total of all the numbers we need to track overwhelm us. If all things require an answer all at once, how can we know where to begin to meet our needs and the needs of those who depend on us?
“Questioning data we’re receiving, asking how it’s relevant to us or how it impacts our ability to field a fully capable unit – that’s how we get rid of data that’s not impactful,” Isrow says.
It’s true that data can overpower with its volume, but triaging data based off our priorities and what we want our end-state to look like – skills that Isrow and analytics professionals like her specialize in – is critical to understanding which combinations of metrics we should care about. Developing that skill requires introspection, clarity of purpose and, as Isrow points out, a fundamental belief in the value of data and analytics. Accomplishing this, she says, “helps us focus on the data that allows us to make decisions as leaders.”
“The biggest pitfall we can fall into,” she says, “is the belief that data is not already here or that it doesn’t impact us. Even jobs that appear removed from data and analytics, all the way down to our factory floors, produce data that we either use or lose. We can’t fight it – data is here to stay. It’s like resisting the arrival of computers while we’re used to typewriters. The question is how we use it and become savvy with it before it renders us obsolete.”
“My mindset is always looking at ways to make people’s jobs and lives easier, and making their jobs more effective,” Isrow says, “… but to improve something and make it easier, you have to start with a baseline of where you are now.” Only with that baseline and with dedicated efforts to track meaningful metrics, she notes, is how we can make decisions “that drive change.”
The temptation of data is to let the superficiality of it speak for itself. If the numbers are too many, if the metrics too abstract, if the understanding of their collective implications is too daunting – then why not believe what we want? Data can be our own personal Mirror of Erised – capable of showing us what we want to see, yet not what we need to know. Data is not valuable because it exists, but because it is the closest thing we can dissect to accurately understand where we are, and how far we are from where we need to go.
In Isrow’s view, data presents a challenge – but it also offers us the insights we need to build the most ready, successful Army we can.
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