Evaluation, statistics and OR

Nasty developments

Over the past month I have noticed a nasty little tendency cropping up on my blogs, and if it happening to me, it is happening to others as well.  I have to say it appears to happen less on this thread than on my other one, and is I think something to do with the level of traffic a site receives.

So what is this little gremlin?  It is Spam, which appears to congratulate the author for being so altruistic as to share information, but as it is badly spelt (often coming from Masters Dissertation students allegedly - but I think not), and sometimes includes a reference to a website to visit, it is obviously not from the heart.  Particularly as the spelling mistakes are the same for many different authors.

I have zero tolerance towards spam e-mail, spam contributions to my weblogs, and to cold sales calls placed to any of my phones, and that includes Skype.  Working remotely, working as a freelancer is difficult enough at the best of times, but this sort of rubbish steals my time in that I have to remove it, while giving me concerns as to whether it is causing any other damage.

If anyone who does do spam, spam contributions or cold calling sales is reading this - please think about what you are doing and imagine you are trying to do something very important yourself, but are impeded by this activity, or your wife, mother, sister, girlfriend is getting this hassle.  Make a New Year's resolution to do something valuable with your life instead of this!

The Power of Excel

I apologise for the lack of postings recently on this forum, but this is due to a surfeit of work, and my clients must come first.

At 4:30pm on a Friday afternoon, I have finally finished a major data crunching exercise, and am in a position to write it all up.  However before I do that, I need to distance myself from the pain and backache of analysing something in excess of 36 files with over 180 separate data sets in excel (and perhaps close to half a million records).  The back pain and also swollen ankles are due to my ability to sit mesmerised in front of a computer screen for hours on end not moving anything but my mouse hand - obsessive and entirely my own fault.

I also need to distance myself from the mental pain of it all.  Excel is a fine product and I am a major fan of spreadsheets - they are very powerful and when used by skilled people can do amazing things.  In the hands of incompetents, they will produce rubbish - but that is the way with many computer tools, particularly statistical ones.  If you feed garbage in, you get garbage out, albeit with pretty graphs.

However for large data sets, Excel isn't always the answer, and my mental pain comes from the fact that about two thirds of the way through my epic analysis task (which took 4 solid days I may add), I realised that I would have been better off and would have done the work more quickly if I had done it differently. 

If I had spend half a day or a day developing an SPSS file with the Excel data all concatenated into one file (easy enough as it was all in a common format), I could then have spend a happy hour programming SPSS to do the analyses it has taken me so much time to do, and a further day to push the SPSS output into a pretty format for the report I will now spend the weekend writing.

There is a rather painful lesson to be learnt here I think!

Is IT a core skill?

The Leitch report has been out for a year - happy anniversary!  Has much changed?  Possibly, but it is too early to tell from the evidence base and I prefer not to rely on press releases about nice things happening.  That is perhaps a bit unfair on the 22 colleges and providers who have just received a standard for excellence in their work with employers from the LSC, but I like to know about results!

Microsoft have done a survey looking at business skills as part of the anniversary event.  From evidence from 500 respondents - UK business leaders - they found that IT skills came 7th in a list of top business skills.  The things our giants of business and industry are looking for are team working and interpersonal skills, initiative and problem solving skills.  Microsoft feels that IT skills are undervalued.

Ho hum - where do I start with pulling this one apart?  Sometimes people make it just too easy after all!

To be of use to business leaders, there are certain automatic skills that people are assumed to have - literacy and numeracy were not on the list, in my view as they were considered to be a basic prerequisite of being employed.  Similarly the ability to speak the language of the employing business was not specifically included although could be understood as part of verbal communication (but what about understanding what you hear?), but I am pretty sure that this is also seen as necessary. 

I am pretty convinced that basic IT ability is also in there with other core skills required to function in the work place, and IT skills only really gain attention when it is something specific - web design, programming ability, the knowledge to prevent a company's systems from being attacked by viruses or spy-ware, ability to manipulate Facebook to the needs of the company.  I think that where IT skills do themselves no favours is that business leaders will see what their children do with computers - school course work and play games - rather less impressive for running a business, unless you sell gaming software.

The top 6 business skills listed are all non-measurable skills, more to do with individual motivation than anything else.  Indeed, looking at the top 6 skills shown below, I believe that they are brilliantly demonstrated by teams in Ocean's 11, the Lady-killers, The Lavender Hill Mob, Wanted and the Italian Job, not to mention The Usual Suspects.  In most of these cases, the ability to use a gun was the seventh skill required, but in some, IT skills were also required.  Perhaps putting the above listed films on Business Studies courses would be more use than studying law, accountancy or psychology?

I think that comment proves that it is too close to Christmas to write more!

Those top 6 business skills in full: 1) Team working and interpersonal skills, 2) Initiative, 3) Analysing and problem solving, 4) Verbal communication, 5) Personal planning and organising, 6) Flexibility.