The Importance of Timely, Valid and Actionable Data

When a crisis hits, organizations have to make decisions fast, and those decisions can affect many people in their company or community. What they can decide well depends on the data they already have: information that is valid, timely and actionable. When data is needed quickly, there is no time to go searching for it.

How one city answered its council early in the COVID-19 pandemic

This post was written in March 2020, as the COVID-19 outbreak was first unfolding. One of our clients, a city we have not named here, received a request from its City Council for economic data to prepare a response. Without that data, it would have been hard to make financial decisions about the pandemic, and the virus could reach the city at any time.

The city already kept its data in ClearPoint, so staff built a report with only the information the council needed. They sent it within a few minutes, without any time spent chasing data. The person who prepared it wrote to us:

… there I was today, being asked for economic data City Council can use to make decisions about response to COVID-19. And I'm so very grateful to have ClearPoint as my tool. It enables me to tell the story of what financial impact this situation could have. …

Why the numbers need context

Decisions that local governments made in those weeks shaped their government funding requests. To make those requests quickly and back them with supporting information, an organization needs both the data and an understanding of what it means. The same holds for businesses and healthcare providers facing an uncertain future: accurate data that is accessible drives the decisions that get made and the plans that get carried out.

Context comes from pairing numbers with words. As our post on qualitative and quantitative data puts it, quantitative data is the “what” and qualitative is the “why” and “how.” Qualitative information gives context to hard numbers, so leaders can understand the factors behind them. Keep both current, because if a number is off or an analysis is old, you’ll be telling the wrong story.

Stacey Ewell, Assistant to the City Administrator at the City of Germantown, Tennessee, makes the same point about residents: “It is all about storytelling. If you can't explain to your customers, residents or your neighbors how the data affects them, and what it means to their daily life, you will not be able to grab their interest.” Germantown shares real-time progress on its strategic initiatives through a Community Dashboard, so the numbers and their meaning are already in front of the public.