Over the last two decades I have seen the fields of operational excellence and technological risk management from many sides. Society and economics evolve and old challenges are overtaken by the new. The world is not running short of opportunities to eliminate waste; to improve security, quality and effectiveness of service; and to protect enterprises from the besetting risks of the partially known. The work goes on.

I have started this blog to share some of my thinking and experience and, I hope, to provide an opportunity for the broader community to refine the old ideas and assimilate the new.

My background is within the Shewhart-Deming tradition of data driven management. That, for me, remains the foundation. However, experiments with new approaches continue to fascinate the community. Among the opportunities facing today’s enterprises is the prospect of absorbing and exploiting the new thinking of the likes of Nassim Taleb, Nate Silver and Daniel Kahneman. One of the things I want to explore here is how to freshen up established approaches with the new ideas. Do we have to abandon those established ideas or does the new thinking extend and refine the old?

Big Data promises to remedy the often heard historic complaint that “there is not enough data”. Big Data creates a new set of disciplines that will benefit from the rigour of established thinking, while challenging that thinking to adapt, and inspiring further new thinking through its own particularities.

I look forward to exploring and sharing with you …