"When we remember 2008, it’s likely we’ll utter the following epitaph: Here lies gut instinct, once the basis of all business decisions. That’s because 2008 will be the year that businesses finally gain access to data that’s good enough to take quick action on."
Ben Worthen, writing in The Wall Street Journal, observed the findings of Gartner's latest CIO survey that point to increasing reliance on business intelligence tools, and sees the fading of a business staple: gut instinct.
Is this a good thing?
Of course, the very purpose of this blogsite is to promote greater automation in information-gathering and decision-making, versus making unsubstantiated decisions that could affect jobs, careers, and millions of dollars in organizational treasure.
We are seeing great strides being made in BI -- the past few years have been very much a so-called "inflection point" in the progress of these systems. We now have digitized every aspect of business operations, from point-of-sale to production. We have all the data needed to look at where a business is, and to some degree, where it's going.
Worthen spoke to Gartner's Mark McDonald, an author of the survey of 1,500 CIOs, who noted that for the third year in a row, CIOs said that “business intelligence software” was their top tech priority. Now, IT departments are rolling out new tools "that let managers make decisions based on these trends."
But is it possible to rely too much on cold, hard, data and charts, versus instinctual serendipitous knowledge? I think great decisions will still need to rely on both. But even our decisioning capabilities -- acting on all this business intelligence data -- is getting a tremendous boost from technology.
As ebizQ colleague James Taylor observes in his latest post, "traditional BI tools are not, perhaps, the best way to get competitive advantage." Instead, James advises, "Enterprise Decision Management (EDM), or Business Decision Management, is the approach you need - it's an approach for automating and improving high-volume operational decisions. Focusing on operational decisions, it develops decision services using business rules to automate those decisions, adds analytic insight to these services using predictive analytics and allows for the ongoing improvement of decision-making through adaptive control and optimization."
BI is just data, but putting actionable decision-making capabilities behind it makes it a powerful competitive weapon.
Sorry, had to react to this one -- it's a pet peeve of mine.
The statement "BI is just data, making it actionable is what counts" trips off the tongue, but a second's thought shows that a ludicrous statement it is. Why on earth would anybody have invested in BI if it wasn't "actionable"? Do we think business users ask for data just for the heck of it?
With the latest technology, we're getting closer than ever to having some of those actions carried out by technology (e.g. EDM) rather than by people, but believe me, BI has always been "a competitive weapon".
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