The Ineffective OSS Scoreboard Analogy

Imagine for a moment that you’re the coach of a sporting team. You train your team and provide them with a strategy for the game. You send them out onto the court and let them play.

The scoreboard gives you all of the stats about each player. Their points, blocks, tackles, heart-rate, distance covered, errors, etc. But it doesn’t show the total score for each team or the time remaining in the game. 

That’s exactly what most OSS reports and dashboards are like! You receive all of the transactional data (eg alarms, truck-rolls, device performance metrics, etc), but not how you’re collectively tracking towards team objectives (eg growth targets, risk reduction, etc). 

Yes, you could infer whether the team is doing well by reverse engineering the transactional data. Yes, you could then apply strategies against those inferences in the hope that it has a positive impact. But that’s a whole lot of messing around in the chaos of the coach’s box with the scores close (you assume) and the game nearing the end (possibly). You don’t really know when the optimal time is to switch your best players back into the game.

As coach with funding available, would you be asking your support team to give you more transactional tools / data or the objective-based insights?

Does this analogy help articulate the message from the previous two posts (Wed and Thurs)?

PS. What if you wanted to build a coach-bot to replace yourself in the near future? Are you going to build automations that close the feedback loop against transactional data or are you going to be providing feedback that pulls many levers to optimise team objectives?

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