Transcending Business Intelligence

How on Earth did this happen? The question is not infrequent, but more to the point, it’s unnecessary. It arises because in many cases, people haven’t thought things through before¬hand. Yes, sometimes people can be unlucky, but far from every time that things go awry. Bad luck is never that consistent – by definition. Thinking things through properly beforehand might seem a fairly obvious requirement for making good decisions, but startlingly often, even critical decisions are made without any in-depth analysis. Well, there may have been some background data lying around somewhere, but not much is done with it. Though it’s easy to blame authoritarian leadership or the like, poor decision making is far more usually due to not really knowing what to do with the available information, whether it’s sufficient and what else needs to be known. The situation today is that most organisations don’t have any structured procedure at all for handling decisions. Lacking are both methods and the knowledge by which to identify and analyse even fairly simple problems. Universities have been offering training in these methods since the mid-90s and a number of companies in the US have begun to introduce a more structured approach to decision making but in many other countries, this doesn’t seem to have gained much ground yet. But you don’t need to do a whole course to become a better decision maker. All you need is to know a few basic principles.