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I’m often asked, “Of all the stakeholders, which one is the most important? Which one is the most valuable resource that the organization must be sure is satisfied?” Let’s look at who the stakeholders are.
• Investors
• Management
• Employees
• Customers
• Suppliers
• Employees’ families
• Community
• Special interest groups
• Investors. An organization promises the investors an income that is better than what they could get from any other place. As a result, they invest their hard-earned money in the organization.
• Management. Managers are promised a good income if they can develop the organization and make it profitable. They often work 50 to 60 hours a week, giving up a lot of their family life. Certainly the organization has an obligation to its managers to provide them financial security and give them meaningful work assignments.
I recently received a data set consisting of the number of major hurricanes in the North Atlantic from 1940 to 2007. (Major hurricanes are those that reach Category 3 status or higher at some point during their existence.)
The first step in analyzing any data set is to look at the data. This means plotting the data in some meaningful format. With data that form a time series, the simplest and best format will be the running record where the data are plotted in time order. The running record for the number of major hurricanes is shown in figure 1.
The first question of data analysis must always be whether the data are homogeneous. If the data are, then we can use them with the various computations commonly taught in statistics classes. However, if the data aren’t homogeneous, then the question becomes, “Why or when did the changes occur?”
