JULY 20188ith growth in data and analytics, it is not uncommon to hear organizations talk about how focused they are on data-driven decision making. The premise behind this focus is that quality of orga-nizational decisions is improved if they are driven by data.Those of us who are in the Analytics pro-fession and for others who are in other busi-ness functions and believe in the power of data, here is a question to think about ­ is it possible to pursue data-driven decision making in our personal lives?My interest in this subject was triggered by a blog by Stephen Wolfram and the book, Bet-ter by Atul Gawande. Wolfram, who is the brain behind Mathematical and Wolfram Alpha, in his blog back in 2012 wrote about the insights he was able to draw from the data crunching he did on personal data that he had accumulated over 20+ years. Wolfram's analysis of his emails, key-strokes, phone calls, meetings, events and walk-ing habits helped him draw very meaningful in-sights. He called out that storing personal data, at the minimum provides the benefit of "memory augmentation" ­ ability to recollect events, inci-dents, actions from data archives as an extension of one's own memory. For the more analytically inclined, he was able to show that more meaning-ful insights could be drawn from personal data. For example, analyzing his email archive helped By Subramanian MS, Head of Analytics, Bigbasket.comBelieving in being smart, quick and efficient to make an individual's life as leisurely as possible, Bangalore based Bigbasket.com is one of the India's largest online food and grocery store that aims to make grocery shopping easy.IN MY OPINIONTHE CASE FOR ANALYTICS IN PERSONAL LIFEWSubramanian MS
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