James Taylor's Decision Management

Joe pointed me to an interesting article in his recent post discussing the power of data, and analytics, to replace "gut instinct" in business. This follows my post earlier this week on getting a competitive edge from your data.

I have to agree with this point of view - clearly companies now have so much data about what works and does not work and so many tools for understanding that data that there is no longer any excuse for just trusting "gut instinct"

Clearly the past is not a perfect image of the future and some things that might work well may not be allowed so it is not just a question of doing analytics on your data - you must use the kind of analytics that make predictions and model uncertainty (predictive analytics). You must also combine them with rules derived from regulations, policies, best practices etc and constantly challenge them with new and potentially better approaches - ongoing randomized testing or adaptive control.

One of the values of a more automated, data-centric approach is that it helps address some of the well known decision making traps because it is not clear that experts REALLY do better when it comes to making decisions. While it may be scary to let machines take decisions, it need not be.
Finally, you might also enjoy my review of Blink