In business and organizational management, facts require data to back them up—otherwise they are just opinions. Data is a tricky entity. To have decision-supporting data, you must be selective in what data you collect and disciplined in your analysis. We are all familiar with Mark Twain’s aphorism about statistics, “There are three kinds of lies:lies, damned lies and statistics.”
One of the most valuable adjuncts to data analysis is data visualization. ” These are techniques that represent points of data in relation to one another in order to understand current status and trends more deeply and quickly. Fact-based decision making is a disciplined process that requires careful thought before processes and procedures are measured in order to collect the right data and then have unbiased, nonjudgmental analysis to extract those facts that are important in making decisions and forecasting the future.