TARGIT CEO, @MortonSandlykke has a very topical post today, ‘Turning Emotion-based Decisions into Fact-based Decisions’.
Morton’s basic premise is that while information availability might have been a bottleneck for better decision-making in the past, that is not the case today.
Today the human is the bottleneck in the decision-making process.
We have been programmed to act on our own biases – built over time through our experiences and our learning paradigms; and colored by our own contexts, cultures and objectives. So, now when we are at the other end of the spectrum – drowning in information – our instincts kick in and we resort to ‘gut-reaction’ decision-making.
Business Intelligence is worth nothing if you don’t change your behavior……..Instead of letting the computer drown you in data, trust it to lead you to a conclusion.
Most of us recognize this truism and may truly believe that we are, in fact, making data-based (or, evidence-based) decisions. This is true in some cases at an individual level but extremely rare at an organizational level. Organizations are still largely structured for gut-based ‘leadership’ and ‘executive’ decisions. There is very little scope for learning from patterns in the data or for running experiments to choose the best strategy.
Q: Why can’t organizations step up to fact-based decision-making?
A: Because they cannot describe the organizational decision-making process.
While most organizations have systematically described their processes, structures and data-stores, the decision making is still in the managers’ heads. Good managers make good decisions and if there are no managers, decisions don’t get made. This is a serious handicap in being scalable and being consistent in business.
Decision modeling using the new DMN Standard and the DecisionsFirst tool are good starting points to start describing decisions.
For Man to truly trust the Machine the decision-making responsibilities between the two have to be explicitly described first and judiciously partitioned next.
This post first appeared on Structured Thoughts.