How often have you heard someone say “We need to be making fact-based decisions” as apposed to “Gut-feel based decisions”

Timo Elliott a colleague of mine has this to say:

It’s one of our core beliefs that decisions made on data are better, of course Scott Adams has a slightly alternate take on that…

Before we can really start to assess whether facts assist us in making decisions, we need to be able to achieve a few other things. The very first thing is we need to find the facts. And given that Butler Group state:

“a number of surveys have concluded that an information-based worker is spending between one and 20 hours each week searching for information”

It appears were spending a lot of time collecting information. Anything we can do to reduce the time spent looking for information and increase the time spent looking at information would seem to be important to getting better decisions faster.

And that is the project I have been working on for a while - BUSINESSSOBJECTS POLESTAR. How to get from “I have a question” to “Here is some useful data” as fast as possible - and to make that accessible and usable by anyone.

“Polestar combines the simplicity of search with the power of BI to offer an iTunes-like interface that will appeal to a currently under-served segment of BI users.” - Cindi Howson, Founder BI Scorecard

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 at 12:06 pm and is filed under Decision Making, Modern Workplace, Polestar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.