The report’s authors state that good decision-making needs:

1. High-quality data
2. Access to advanced systems and training
3. Sound judgment
4. Trust
5. Flexibility

My colleague Timo also blogged on this some time ago - here.

One  interesting comments from this document:

Phil Papesh, director of regulatory and administrative systems at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), notes that even at companies with cutting-edge systems, there are trade-offs between data speed and quality. “We can answer most of your questions, but as we get richer data, the practicality of answering any question you have is a problem.”

I think this challenge is an interesting one. If we know that there is too much to “practically” make available, what mechanism do we employ to choose where to focus our efforts. Today most organizations choose based on some “perceived importance” metric - usually based on the recurring need or operational needs of the business. This naturally weights itself to those with influence in the organization - the executives. And as the cost of making more and more information more and more trusted increases, the capacity of IT is further and further constrained.

So how can we cope with this growing volume of information, and who should be selecting what to make available and what not to make available. I would argue that we should apply technology to actually solve the problems that limit our ability to provide all the information. We need to look for ways to make all the information, in any form readily accessible; then look at what is getting used and invest in making that information better and better.

At Business Objects we have been looking to deliver more distributed access to information since day 1. Trying to find ways to broaden the audience who can access information by empowering the analyst and the business users. BusinessObjects Polestar continues this trend, by looking to make access even simpler and allowing anyone to find answers to questions with skills they already have - the ability to describe a search. Enter a keyword or two and your off.

Polestar is built around the idea that we all know what we want, or that we would recognize it when we see it. So Polestar starts a conversation with the user that asks them to describe what they want, then employs search to quickly narrow the range of results.

From then on the experience remains simple, click on what you want from the available options which are determined from the data.  Since the options are arranged to make the most useful most visible, this process is very natural. Eventually you have what your looking for, or the confidence that you have the best available.

This intuitive experience for finding information allows us to remove one huge part of the costs of making more information available. The need to train people in the tools and more importantly to train them to understand the data itself. After all, you do not get training on how to employ Amazon or Google. What is more, once people are heading to a single place to find information, you can continue to add more and more information to it without having to inform people that its there - they will find it themselves.

Once people can access information, it is much easier to identify what information really matters in your organization and to focus your efforts on making that information as high quality and as highly available as you can afford.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 12:07 pm and is filed under Decision Making, 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.