THE THREE WICKED PROBLEMS INHIBITING DATA-DRIVEN DECISION-MAKING IN THE ARMY
Zachary Szewczyk | 06.27.23
The Three Wicked Problems Inhibiting Data-Driven Decision-Making in the Army
Military leaders have sought hard data to drive their decisions for decades, perhaps most famously beginning with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s so-called Whiz Kids in the 1960s. As retrospective analysis of McNamara’s data-driven approach to strategy made clear, however, data alone does not good decisions make. Errors in collection, transmission, and presentation decimated the efficacy of this initiative. The Vietnam War is a cautionary tale in data-driven decision-making gone wrong, an important reminder that modernity’s insatiable need for ever more data may be no more a silver bullet today than it purported to be sixty years ago.
Reasons for data’s failure to enable perfected decision-making are legion. Careful attention must be paid to the assumptions underlying the trend toward centralized decision-making, a concept that relies on complex, brittle systems of systems, demolishes agility and adaptability, and runs counter to the decentralized mandates of mission command. Here, too, we must not only ask whether or not we can enable certain functions with data, but also whether or not we should. Important questions regarding the efficacy of data-driven decision-making must also be addressed, especially in a world where data overload is not a danger but rather a given. Finally, well-studied biases threaten to make efforts to achieve data-driven decision-making little more than a quest for decision-driven data. Here, however, I deal only with the substantial technical challenges facing the joint force in making data-driven decisions. These challenges fall into three categories: collection, transport, and presentation. They represent the most significant barriers to meeting the threefold requirements for analysis—(1) correct and complete data, (2) in a suitable platform, with (3) the requisite analytics to answer decision-makers’ information requirements. And each challenge is a wicked problem, one for which no perfect solution exists, only progressively better ones.
Collection
In the context of data-driven decision-making, collection refers to the acquisition of data. Notably, this diverges from the definition of “collection” in Army Doctrine Publication (ADP) 2-0, Intelligence, which defines it as not only “the acquisition of information” but also the “provisioning” of this information to “processing elements.” In a data context, that secondary step raises its own challenges that are typically less present with other types of intelligence collection, so data transport should be considered independently of collection.
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/the-three-wicked-problems-inhibiting-data-driven-decision-making-in-the-army/
