English is a wonderfully robust language, providing significant wiggle room for how terms are applied. This is particularly true of “data driven” and “data informed”, both of which have been thrown around a lot over the past few years. This leads to the questions: How are they different? and When should you apply each one? Here are my thoughts.
Both of these terms tend to be used interchangeably, with data driven seeming to be the more popular of the two. However, each of them describes a different style of decision making. This really wasn’t a problem a few years ago when the terms were mostly just applied to human decision making. The English language isn’t exact and people generally accept that. With the recent emergence of AI in the mainstream business world, more and more decisions, particularly the mundane ones. are being relegated to systems. This is enabled by AI-based technologies, thus freeing people to focus on more impactful decisions.
The evolving context of how various types of decisions are relegated motivate us to be more precise with our language. To summarize, “data driven” applies to the types of decisions relegated to systems whereas “data informed” applies to how people should decide.
Systems are Data Driven
Decision-making systems, including but not limited to artificial intelligence (AI), are in effect data driven. What I mean by that is that the algorithms encapsulated by the system take the data as input, process it in some manner, and make decisions based on that data as per the algorithms. Those decisions are driven by the data and the logic of the algorithms. This is true of traditionally-built systems where the logic is coded, and even of unsupervised or semi-supervised AI systems where the logic has been learned. Furthermore, in the case of the aforementioned AI systems, the learned logic is driven solely through the processing of data. The point is that the “decision” is completely driven by the combination of the input data and the algorithm that processes it.
People are Data Informed
Decision makers, at least the effective ones, tend to be data informed. Yes, the data is an input into the person’s decision process. In a completely rational world the person would consider the data and let that drive their decision. But it’s not a completely rational world. Yes, sometimes people make rational, logical decisions based on the data available to them. Sometimes they don’t. They consider the data, and for whatever reason made a different decision than what would be the completely rational choice. The point is that the data informs the decision, but it doesn’t necessarily drive it.
“Data Driven” vs “Data Informed” – Is This Nuance Important?
Yes, but in practice I suspect we’ll continue to see the term “data driven” dominate most discussions. I, on the other hand, will do my best to use the terms as I’ve described here.