Million-dollar decisions shouldn’t be made on old data. But at many companies, they are.
As Managing Partner & Fractional CIO at Taffet Associates, Greg Taffet helps companies solve this by building systems that deliver the right data to the right people while there’s still time to act on it.
“We’ve had delays in collecting and analyzing data in the past, which has made it harder to manage projects,” Taffet says. “And if you have the data available in seconds and you can organize it in the right way for executive management to get information out of the data, then we can make better decisions.”
Here’s how Taffet thinks about why data speed is a competitive advantage, and what happens when companies don’t have it.
When Data Isn’t Ready, Teams Default to Guessing
Without timely data, Taffet sees teams fall back on historical estimates. They try to match the current situation to the closest thing they’ve seen before.
“When data isn’t available, it really makes us use estimates,” Taffet says. “And we base those estimates on historical information.”
Taffet walked through an example that makes the delay tangible. Someone in the field puts a project expense on a credit card. That charge doesn’t get processed until end of week, doesn’t hit the account until end of month, and doesn’t get correlated to the right project until a week or two after that. Meanwhile, leadership wants to know how the project is performing today.
The problem compounds when the real data finally arrives. If the estimates were off, there’s an obligation to do a postmortem. Was it the person, the process, or the system? Taffet made the point that tooling matters here too. A system that’s too complex doesn’t get used properly. A system that’s too simple doesn’t give the right answer. He called it the “Goldilocks compromise.”
“If you have a system that’s too complex, people don’t use it properly,” Taffet says. “If you have a system that’s too simple, it doesn’t give you the right answer.” The real cost of slow data isn’t the initial estimate. It’s everything that happens downstream when the estimate turns out to be wrong.
Being Competitive Means Fast Data That People Can Actually Use
For Taffet, the stakes go beyond operational efficiency. He framed it in terms most executives understand immediately.
“In today’s very competitive markets, it can be the difference between staying in business and going out of business.”
If you can be more accurate with your data, you understand your ROI better. If you understand your ROI better, you can price more competitively and bid more confidently. that means you win more business.
But accuracy isn’t just about speed. Taffet draws a sharp line between data and information, and he thinks most people overlook the distinction.
“Data is pretty useless until we put it in context,” Taffet says, “and the context gives it the understanding to the executives.”
Tell an executive “we have 5,000 hours” and they’ll ask: with respect to what? Tell them this project is $5,000 under the estimated budget and now they have something to work with. The raw numbers haven’t changed. But one version is data and the other is information.
This is why Taffet described a shift in what systems are supposed to do.
“We want systems that make the company more competitive,” he says. Not just faster at the same tasks, but fundamentally better at capturing data correctly, analyzing it correctly, and delivering it as information to the people who can act on it. Speed gets the data there. Context makes it useful. You need both.
This is the problem Hydrolix was built to solve. Instead of letting log data go cold in archives where it takes hours or days to query, Hydrolix keeps it hot and searchable in seconds. The result is exactly what Taffet is describing: teams that operate on information instead of estimates, at the speed the business actually requires.
The Bottom Line
The pattern Taffet describes plays out everywhere. Data arrives late, teams estimate, estimates go wrong, and the cleanup costs more than the delay. The fix starts with making sure the data is ready before someone needs it.
Hydrolix keeps your data hot and queryable in seconds so your team operates on information, not guesswork.
