Category: Analytics Leadership

How I Use Logic As An Analyst

Here is a follow up to the student I am helping with her class assignment on Logic… She asked me how I apply logic as an analyst with an example and here is what I came up with.

How I Use Logic As An Analyst

According to Webster’s Dictionary, logic is “the science or art of exact reasoning” and analyst is “someone who is skilled at analyzing data”. The two definitions are where I start when how I think back to the application of logic during my career as an analyst.

To solve business problems you need data. You need to identify the right data, analyze it and communicate your results. In all three aspects of analysis work you need to employ logic.

Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes
Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes

When you are given a business problem to solve, say how to determine a market for a new project or trying to figure the cause behind a slowdown in production, you need to start with data. What data you get, how you get it and where you get it from is all driven by a combination of your business experience and logic.

Logic helps you eliminate data that useful to the problem at hand. One time when I was looking for data on current remittance flows to China, a logic driven approach would be to start looking at Chinese economic websites. Which I did using the science of logic.

Once I got some data sources on remittances from the US to China, I then used logic in my analysis. Is the data current? Is the source reliable? Is it relevant? Logic dictated that I not use sources that were more than a year old, where not from government sources and where directly providing data on remittances to China.

In my analysis I saw several patterns, most remittances where going to only two provinces. That is logical when you research to see that most immigrants to the US come from these two provinces.

And when I was ready to communicate my results, my choice on which application to use, what tone to use in my language and what visuals to use were all driven by my knowledge of the audience.

Since this was for a senior manager, well-versed in remittance patterns and very comfortable with big data speak, I just cut and past some charts from Excel into an e-mail and gave him 2-3 bullet points about the patterns I saw and noted my source. It was logical that he didn’t need a lot of explanation or easy to see analysis given his pedigree.

If this had been for a more general audience of say fresh grads who have never looked at this kind of data before, it would be logical to use PowerPoint, supply several descriptive notations and some easy to digest visuals that show remittance trends.

Trying to provide students with a report designed for senior managers is illogical for someone like myself with a lot of business analysis experience.

In the end, it is my opinion that few career paths call for a more consistent application of logic then does that of an analyst.

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Analytics > Based on the Principles of Logic

One of my trainees recently asked me for some help with an assignment she had in her philosophy class. Now I am such a Star Trek fan aka Trekie, that of course the first thing that comes to mind in the character Spock.

I imagine that is anyone ever took a formal survey of analysts and analytics professionals, most would list Spock high on their list of “cool characters.” The use of logic to solve problems is a key plot point in several episodes and movies. Anyway, I digress…

The assignment is to look at the paperwork in a business and determine how logic and logical principles are applied. I look at logic as being used primarily in two different facets of paperwork.

1. to set priorities… using deductive reasoning to decide what priority is more important and which one to work on first. This is something that is hard to teach and a common interview question. Trying to determine if a person knows how to establish priorities tells you a lot about how logical they think.

2. to establish procedures… logic is used to set up a process like an assembly line or a pipeline where things are done in a routine that is most logical. Being efficient and optimizing a process require a lot of logic in the design and implantation of the process.

So for paperwork… the paperwork that gets done first is the highest priority like payroll… logic dictates that paying employees is the most important and logic helps you set up a process for paperwork… like if a form needs three signatures, you would use logic to set the order of whose signature you get first, second and third

When you have a problem with a process or too many priorities to accomplish all, you use logic to help you solve the problem.

Analytics, or the discipline of using data to drive decision-making in a business, is closely related. Logic is used to identify the data you need, logic is required to interpret the analysis and logic is needed to determine how bet to communicate your findings.

When you look at any business (or government, organization, structure, etc.), you need to employ logic to make that business run and paperwork is a big, big part of the resulting of using logic. Forms, reports, summaries, etc… they are all receptacles of logic that are used to keep things moving.

So when asked why I do what I do when it comes to the paperwork in my business, I am going to tell you because its logical to do it that way. Or as Spock might say, “Logic dictates how and why we use paperwork.”

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