Tag: Identify the Problem

Identify the Problem, Part 5: Rely on Technology for Short-term Gain Instead of Long-Term Skill, Newspapers and Music

I listened recently to the episode “The Future of Reporting with Mandy Matney,” from the The Emily Show. That is a podcast by Emily D. Baker. For this episode, she interviewed Mandy Matney of the True Sunlight podcast, formerly known as the Murdaugh Murders podcast.

After that long prelude, the parts I’m going to write about are fairly short:

  • Matney said she used to work as a reporter for a newspaper that was owned by a larger newspaper conglomerate. She said the big newspapers focus more on “trending” topics than complex and important issues which will take a lot of resources to follow and research. Among other things, at one point she was assigned to write three to five articles a day about issues trending on Twitter or Reddit. News stories don’t get national attention unless they start trending, and then almost all of the national papers repeat the same information with different headlines.
  • Baker replied that she is seeing something similar while covering stories about the music industry. Instead of investing in a band for a few albums to see if the band can gain a following and take off, the music industry will now invest in a band or performer for one song. And if that one song doesn’t take off on TikTok, then they move on.

In doing this, both industries are killing the things that originally created them. Technology makes this easier. It might provide a more convincing rationale in the short term. But that is still what is happening.

Identify the Problem, Part 4: ADP Destroys Its Own Numbers.

My Irritation

Yes, I’ve been ranting for a while now about the need to identify the problem before going hell bent after a “solution”.

The examples keep showing up. Here is another example:

“ADP, for example, changed their methodology to try to produce a job number that would be more predictive of the NFP data. Why they would take their own unique payroll data (and manipulate it) to try to estimate the official government data is beyond me, but they did it. So, ADP isn’t really trying to analyze how many jobs were created, it is trying to produce data that helps people predict NFP (at least the Establishment Survey).”

Peter Tchir, “Sherlock Holmes on the Jobs Report“, Zerohedge, dated June 11 2023, last accessed June 29 2023. Emphasis in original.

ADP is a payroll company. Producing jobs numbers is not their main job. But their jobs report is often looked at as another indicator of employment trends in the U.S. economy.

Tchir’s whole article, “Sherlock Holmes on the Job Report” in Zerohedge, dated June 11 2023, was about trying to make sense out of numbers that didn’t always have as much sense as a person would hope for. The paragraph about ADP changing its own numbers was one of many.

But in a sea of weirdness, it stuck out to me as being particularly weird. What problem was ADP trying to solve?

  • If the attention to their payroll report was interfering with their business of providing payroll services for companies, why not say that and stop with the report entirely?
  • If they were doubting their own internal numbers . . . I can’t think of any reason why they’d doubt their own internal numbers. But if there was some reason for that, I’d expect them to put the report and almost everything else non-essential on hold until that doubt got resolved. If I doubted the numbers for a core part of my business, resolving that would be top priority.
  • So, what “problem” does that leave, that this would be a valid solution? They wanted to stop using their own numbers, while not making it obvious they were no longer using their own numbers?

How is this related to technology?

One of the primary uses of technology, of all types, is manipulating information. Gathering it, tracking it, saving it, collating it, sorting it, looking for patterns in it.

Computer software in particular is really good at manipulating information. In a way, that’s a definition of what computer software is and does: it manipulates information. It manipulates it far faster than humans can.

There’s the perennial problem of GIGO – Garbage In Garbage Out. If the software starts with data that is bad or wrong, it’s output will almost certainly be bad or wrong.

But there’s a less recognized problem: solving the wrong problem.