Managing other people's money - our internal money, money from a customer, money from an investor - means making rational decisions based on facts. In an uncertain and emerging future, making those decisions means assessing the impact of that decision on that future in terms of money, time, and delivered value.
To make those decisions - in the presence of this uncertainty - implies we need to develop information about the variables that appear in that future. We can use past data of course. That data needs to be adjusted for several factors:
- Does this data in the past represent data in the future?
- Does this data have a statistical assessment for variance, standard deviation, and other moments that we can use to assess the usefulness of the data for making decisions in the future?
- Are there enough data points to create a credible forecast of the future?
No answers to these questions? That data you collected not likely to have much value in making decisions for the future.
