Life can be so simple if we don't have the opportunity to choose. One has to just take what's available. Live with it and work to improve it. It can't get simpler than that. Isn't it?
But the real problem is it's not true. Life at no point is simple and doesn't matter wherever we are, we always want choices in everything. With multiple choice available in almost everything from personal to business, we get surrounded by two basic selection problems
1. Problem of plenty
2. Probability of selection made is correct.
Whom/what to choose - Problem of plenty
Talk to a student applying for college and ask him about the problem he is facing and he will respond with what course and which college to go to.
Ask Indian cricket team selector or captain about Rahane's future in T20 playing eleven and they will respond with where to fit him in current line up.
Ask a fund manager and he will show you thousands of stocks and mutual fund to choose from and overlay it with investment plans.
Ask a human resource manager of a company about his biggest problem at work and he will come back saying getting the right candidate for the job.
One can go on and on with examples from different life cycles and we will still get the same response of whom to choose.
Well only when you have solved the jigsaw of whom, arrives a much bigger problem. Is the choice made correct? What is the probability of failure and whom should be hold responsible for it?
Only way to get answers to above questions is wait and watch. Not much can be done, if you have given loan to a customer and he goes bad. Only actions which remain in lender's hand are recovery and legal, both of which are cost inefficient and time taking process.
An employee selected for a role may or may not be good at work. Or even if he is good at work, there are always chances of him to quit the job and join competition.
Even when fund manager has selected a list of stocks and funds as per the best of knowledge, there is no guaranteed performance returns on them.
I again take up Rahane, if selected, what should be his role - to open the innings or to come down the order and finish the match.
Clearly selection becomes a major problem area for organisations to crack.
Here data can be a life saver. An statistically proven model based on evoluting information from multiple sources can become a handy tool to be deciding factor here.
It might be a possibility that one model is insufficient in reaching the goal and a multiple model approach need to be taken to achieve the grand design.
This brings us to a point where global database or data bureau are needed where multiple such data products can be developed and used.
Imagine a global employment database or players database of not just internationally playing or played players but players playing at all level even school or a global human information bureau where all possible individual information is captured, stored and analyzed.
Imagine a world of data products.
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