Staying On The T, Working Creatively With The Flow
Those who have played squash will be familiar with the strategic possession of the T.
By staying on the T the game can be controlled.
Easier said than done but that is a singularly powerful spot to play from.
As a metaphor, staying on the T in a business solution strategy requires identifying the concepts that lead to the greatest efficiency and effectiveness.
As always it equates with a minimalist approach. Interestingly, in Science when there is more than one equally useful theory for a phenomenon the most parsimonious one is the better one to adopt - minimalism again.
That is called Occam's Razor ... see the Wikipedia reference:
"Occam's razor, also known as Ockham's razor, and sometimes expressed in Latin as lex parsimoniae (the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness), is a principle that generally recommends selecting from among competing hypotheses the one that makes the fewest new assumptions."
Like the squash player who has lost control of the T, huge amounts of energy can be otherwise squandered in the running around chasing of the ball.
To stay on the 'solution T' requires creatively working with the flow of the operational circumstances.
Measuring the efficacy of green interventions or harvesting carbon credits requires all of this.
Logistically, conventional methods of processing data can be very much like chasing the squash ball from everywhere but from the T.
Data mining and information delivery is not just a matter of applying a data extract tool et voila.
I once tried to explain this to an aspiring player in the Green Field without success.
The misunderstanding was (maybe still is) that "... have tool, plug and play, all come out."
Data will not just tumble out of the woodwork and assemble itself into nicely packaged information quanta.
There are no real life pieces of string interconnecting all that needs to be interconnected.
These “strings” are virtual and exist inside the head of the Data Miner.
Yes, the GUI relationship models show the linkages between data elements for the given applications in the enterprise but when measuring Green in All its Forms one is mostly working with history, a myriad transactions performed to achieve the core business of the enterprise itself.
In a sense, this myriad-set is like an amorphous block of stone in front of a sculptor.
What can be shaped from it?
And how can the same block of stone be reused in different ways to emerge as different forms (diverse rating/scoring systems)?
Also, somewhere "up there in the mists and forests", obscured, are the "blocks of data stone".
How do you get to these with the minimum of effort? Clamber up mule tracks or have them flow magically downhill.
Often the paths that are tramped upon to get to the stone blocks of data are conventional, deeply rutted and a 'long and winding road'.
Creativity and imagination is necessary to transform logistical nightmares into swift retrievals of data.
And if repeatability is required, as it must surely be, then the challenge is even greater.
Laborious green snapshots are not sustainable due to the effort.
Sweet-point, low-effort, continuous monitoring is.