Partly inspired by my recent post, Timo Elliot has just posted two really funny and clever cartoons (here and here) about executive attitudes toward BI and what they truly want out of their business intelligence systems.
Timo hits the proverbial nail right on the proverbial head in that "gut feel" is just that; not actionable intelligence that will provide better metrics for the business. Plus, the fact that many decision makers still seek a magical technology solution that takes your problems away with the push of a button.
The lesson here is that business intelligence requires both robust technology that is capable of accessing and tracking many aspects of the business, in combination with the intuitive insights of decision makers. You can have all the greatest technology in the world, but if you don't have a forward-thinking corporate culture that encourages managed risk-taking -- and, very importantly, even encourages failure to some degree -- things will not progress.
James Taylor, who wrote the book on decision-making and technology (check it out, here!) also got a kick out of Timo's cartoons, noting in is latest post that the lesson in all this is that it's time to start focusing "on the challenge of automating decisions, not just supporting them. After all, front-line workers have less time and less experience with data analysis and so are easier to overwhelm with data. They are also, perhaps, not the people you want making "gut-feel" decisions about your customers."
That last line is the key; it's important -- both from a profitability and even legal standpoint -- to be able to automate and standardize decisioning for day-to-day operations. James points out that the higher-level strategic decisions "are not repeatable enough to lend themselves to automation." Instead, "often these decisions are about decision strategy - how aggressive should I be about pricing decisions, about retention, about risk."
While we may not have reached the point where we simply push a certain key if we decide we want to save millions of dollars, technology is helping us reach the point where we can say "'which of these three approaches should generate the best return, given the real-world constraints on my business,' and then have an easy way to pick the rules that seem to work best and push them into production without pain," James said.
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