OODA: How Top Gun Strategies Relates to Agile Projects and Data Analytics
A brief part of history
Developed by military strategist and US Air Force Col. John Boyd in the 1950s, OODA loops were first used to describe how fighter pilots were trained to react to constantly changing conditions in air-to-air combat. Boyd later expanded the concept of the OODA loop to encompass decision making at the tactical, operational and strategic levels of war. Since that time, the OODA loop concept has been adopted by the commercial business community because it enables organizations to overcome competitors using decision strategies, rather than brute force.
Bryan Haris, Director of Research and Development for Cyber analytics in SAS, made a presentation at a Military Operations Research Society (MORS) Industry Showcase, explaining how the use of OODA loops puts big data and analytics into a framework that can help organizations make critical decisions to improve competitive advantage or outsmart an opponent.
But what the heck defines OODA Loop
In simple definition, the acronym means from Observe, Orient, Decide and Act.
- When we talk about Observe, the cycle begins with the step of collecting data bout the environment, people and circumstances.
- The Orient phase, individuals turn the data collected in value, they apply context to it.
- Once you understand the value your data can have, you can Decide and identify courses of action and weight the potential outcomes of those actions.
- Now it´s time to Act. Once you finish your acts, the OODA Loop begins again.
This technique consist in collect relevant information, recognize possible concepts, decide and act, and then repeating the process with new information obtained from the same process.
It looks familiar, right? As with agile processes, the OODA loop consists of collecting information, analyzing and processing it from the environment in a continuous feedback loop, or in this case, returning updated information.
You may be wondering now, what type of business can use military techniques to achieve their goals and perform you operations.
So, Netflix is a big example of it. When Netflix transform your business model to logistic delivery to a software engineering company, it made that by OODA Loop, making the correct view and analysis of the market.
This methodology simplifies the concept of decision making and put analytics into a decision-oriented frame of reference that allows your project to better act in order to perform.
Data Analysis in OODA
The data collection provide a better understand the situation and a bigger comprehension shared in the four principal areas of space and decision in the OODA context. The figure bellow shows how data analysis support the process and step in the loop.
At Orientation phase, the data analysis allows you to make more accurate and faster decisions. In competitive environments, time is the name of the game. Innovations and the evolution of competition increase the time pressure on decision makers at managerial and operational scales.
The data are transformed in information using computational power, where the patterns are quickly identified. Knowing the need for quick action, the decision maker can analyze the impact of action using statistical accuracy with appropriate and effective measures. Data analysis serves to improve a decision making by decreasing the time to analyze existing data, quantifying differences between existing courses of action, and measuring decision impact.
References
- Data Analytics in the Combatant Command: Improving the Approach to Decision-Making — Jane Butler, Ross Coffey, Kathryn Pegues, and John Salvador
- Closing the OODA Loop: Using Big Data and Analytics to Improve Decision Making — Bryan Harris, SAS.
- Optimizing Business Intelligence using the OODA Framework — Morten Middelfart
