Insight is NOT necessarily a good thing. While I don’t advocate ignorance, too much information without mechanisms to help simplify it will only lead to one of two things: procrastinated delays or misguided reactions.

My biggest take-aways from your feedback include your expression of ‘blind faith’ with commissioning research and analysis and doing nothing with it. Secondly, you enlighten with classic examples of apparent ‘market-leaders’ (Better Homes & HSBC), the other danger of reporting: Misinformation. Simply because somebody has conducted a study does not make it an authoritative reference. This region does have the same checks and balances to validate research as commonplace in the West.

Thank you once again! We must continue this discussion. My next piece on this needs as many real examples from the region as possible. Both you and Iman have helped jump-start that process.

Analysis is a bottom-up approach, and decisions today are top-down in nature. Therein lies the irony. The solution to this dilemma starts with simplification, followed by the ability of decision-makers to actually decide that needs to be done. Here and now. Period.

Thanks again for the wonderful feedback. This discussion is not over.

Other issues that frustrate me is the methods of analysis that are used to come up with the results.
For example, Better homes (real estate agency) last year issued a study on the status of the secondary market for residential property, and at the time, the bulk of the units they put for re-sale were ALDAR products (not sure how many houses they had, but it was around 70). The report they issued covered everything from price fluctuations, to market situations and the supply and demand of ALDAR’s products. Now that seems to be like a pretty much comprehensive report. but guess what? They didn’t sell a single house!! on what basis are they giving latest info on pricing, transactions and demand?!?!?! they were speechless. And what is even funny, is that, that report was used as a basis for HSBC’s mortgage study!! and so on so forth

Another example, when i worked at a property development company, we comissioned four international research companies to analyse Abu Dhabi’s Office market( kinda like gettin a second opinion), once we got the results back. we had four COMPLETE different figures on the size of office supply in Abu Dhabi!!!
not many had a clear explanation of how this figure came up, but constant meetings and revisions showed us the following:
Company A only surveyd office buildings within the city of Abu Dhabi
Company B surveyed office buildings within the city of Abu Dhabi and its outskirts
Company C did not include mixed use buildings (i.e buildings that have 3 floors of offices and the rest of floors are apartments)
Company D did not include Villas that were occupied as offices.

Now while each of these 4 reports could be correct, the fault was in reporting the figures as “Total Office Supply” and that is very misleading! and you could not have said any better when you wrote ” Analysis will always remain key in the decision-making process. However, making sense of it has become another story.”

Thankfully our role was to simplify the results of these studies, and thats how we got to know the methodlogies used behind each of these studies.

I could go on and on about the various misleading and misrepresented analysis that i encountered, but it will take me days to write them down. perhaps we can discuss this further at iman’s brainstorm session.

All the best

Other issues that frustrate me is the methods of analysis that are used to come up with the results.
For example, Better homes (real estate agency) last year issued a study on the status of the secondary market for residential property, and at the time, the bulk of the units they put for re-sale were ALDAR products (not sure how many houses they had, but it was around 70). The report they issued covered everything from price fluctuations, to market situations and the supply and demand of ALDAR’s products. Now that seems to be like a pretty much comprehensive report. but guess what? They didn’t sell a single house!! on what basis are they giving latest info on pricing, transactions and demand?!?!?! they were speechless. And what is even funny, is that, that report was used as a basis for HSBC’s mortgage study!! and so on so forth

Another example, when i worked at a property development company, we comissioned four international research companies to analyse Abu Dhabi’s Office market( kinda like gettin a second opinion), once we got the results back. we had four COMPLETE different figures on the size of office supply in Abu Dhabi!!!
not many had a clear explanation of how this figure came up, but constant meetings and revisions showed us the following:
Company A only surveyd office buildings within the city of Abu Dhabi
Company B surveyed office buildings within the city of Abu Dhabi and its outskirts
Company C did not include mixed use buildings (i.e buildings that have 3 floors of offices and the rest of floors are apartments)
Company D did not include Villas that were occupied as offices.

Now while each of these 4 reports could be correct, the fault was in reporting the figures as “Total Office Supply” and that is very misleading! and you could not have said any better when you wrote ” Analysis will always remain key in the decision-making process. However, making sense of it has become another story.”

I could go on and on about the various misleading and misrepresented analysis that i encountered, but it will take me days to write them down. perhaps we can discuss this further at iman’s brainstorm session.

All the best

But true! I recall in my previous company, we paid proper fortune to actually develop systems that would simply summarize all the data from all the holding group to literally 4 main slides, which do contain some text, but the main components of em are color coded flags, so if the flag is green, the management doesn’t need to check the details, if its yellow or red, then the management can drill down to whatever level they would wish, to know the core of the problem to whatever detail they want! In a sense, that was a pure proper efficient implementation of a Business Intelligent system. There were cases in which the management recognized an issue but chose not to action on em, but that was a different political matter

Saying that, the working situations were different! We didn’t spend much time in reporting, if we did, it would have been one report that fed the system, from which it created the needed different versions.

From the other side, in my current organization, a pure bureaucratic organization, the reporting in it is outrageous! I can easily tell u I spend more time in filling almost 4 different reports on the same projects, at times reporting delays in all of em coz am wasting my time rewriting the same micro details in different structures and formats rather than managing my actual job! And at the end, every manager and director upholds bazillion reports from different projects, and ends up being overwhelmed and not actionning directly on what needs direct attention!

The funny part is, when they consider fixing the situation, the solution is to introduce an additional report instead of revising the old ones and maybe aggregating them in one! But no! Everyone wants to look at the report from their own angle! Leading in nothing being actionned upon, and delays from everywhere due to occupation with filling those redundant reports!

While in the first company, the leader recognized that he needs minimal generic info to know the actual status so he could pursue planning on the group level, the other company considered the power in holding all the micro details rather than understanding the generic picture. I guess in a way or another they end up chasing their own tails with that.

I build information systems and do lot of reporting and it saddens me the most when after going into trouble for first convincing the company to have a strong reporting module, they just don’t use 10% of what was built

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