I enjoyed Tim O’Reilly’s post today, Waking up from the ‘Nightmare on Tech Street’, itself a response to Om Malik’s recent piece. Finally, I felt, someone was touching on the upside of oil demands finally declining, or celebrating the slowdown in our culture of excessive consumerism.

As he notes, peak production usually equals peak waste:

In a recent conversation with my daughter Arwen and son-in-law Saul Griffith, Matt Webb remarked that he’d like 2008 to be remembered as the year of “peak consumption.” Saul pointed out, though, that the term “peak waste” is perhaps more accurate. In an analogy to peak oil, he suggested that maybe we’ve reached the pinnacle of waste in our consumer culture. I do wonder if we will look back at the past few decades as a kind of sick aberration rather than a golden age, with good times we want to get back to. Like Saul, I’m hopeful that we can get rid of the waste, and get back to creating things of lasting value.

I’ve heard the term waste applied in another way lately, in regard to people spending time in social sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. These pundits usually follow such comments with an aside like, “I don’t need to be talking to people about what I just ate for lunch.” And then, of course, people laugh, thinking, Oh, those silly, wasteful twitterers.

Those of us that actually use Twitter may have another perspective: perhaps this is a lean, efficient mode of communication. Perhaps a glance at it a few times a day can lead to unexpected insights and help build better relationships. And maybe even be a little bit fun.
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So it turns out that, perhaps, Dinosaurs were felled not by a gigantic asteroid, but by tons of sulfur polluting the atmosphere. Think of the smell!

Whichever theory will prove true remains to be seen, but we see this again and again: sufficient evidence over sufficient time leads us to a worldview which feels more and more like fact. Facts that we make decisions on. Facts that that lend concreteness to our lives.

How many arguments have been made for asteroid research and defense techniques that cite the extinction of dinasaurs?  Many. If Volcanoes turn out to be the true culprit, do we know which policies or government programs should be revisited to see if they are still valid?

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Jason Kincaid wrote a nice piece on TechCrunch about the progress of OpenSocial (a standard interface for plugging your social application into a social network), with a rather attractive and impressive chart:

So what does this have to do with decision making? Not much, but it is such a pretty chart, so I thought I’d post it.

Actually, it is a bit relevant. We’ve talked about how the workplace is being transformed, and this is part of the reason… the increasing social aspects of applications. While OpenSocial is usually talked about in context of the popular consumer Social Networks (which gives them the ridiculous and oft-misleading numbers above), a growing number of enterprise applications are starting to utilize it, for a simple reason: it is not that hard, and it gives you wide reach.

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I’m a big fan of Zipcar, as those around me know.  I just reserved one for tomorrow, and since I waited so long, I had to choose a pickup waiting at a local McDonalds, instead of my usual Prius down the street.  But I didn’t mind since it took me only about 25 seconds to find it, book it, and have a car ready for me tomorrow at 5:30 AM.

As I did this I was thinking about speed.  Satisfying the speed of business is not about perfection  — it is about things being good enough, provided they are fast enough.

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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.

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I work at a large company.  My nature is to move quickly, which often feels impossible.  In the past few weeks, a lot of the impossibility has involved not knowing the right people.

A lot of smart people think about this, for example the labcoats behind Organization Network Analysis.  Looking at how people work together in a network can often yield surprising insights into whether the organization can move fast or slowly.

A lot of the rest of us do this everyday without thinking about it, with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Yammer and the rest, leveraging each other to speed ourselves up (I didn’t list MySpace, since that slows people down).

But it comes down to one thing… the degree to which you can communicate effectively, quickly, and trustfully with the people you need to get things done.  If you couldn’t conceivably get agreement with someone over IM then you don’t have the right relationship with them to decide things in business time.  The last guy I hired I negotiated purely over SMS while I was on the tarmac, otherwise I would have lost him.

Fast Fast Fast Fast requires People People People People.

What are the elements of a decision, what is the basic structure that every decision can encompass.

Access to information

Most decisions will require some information, especially if we want to make an informed decision. Information comes in many forms of course. Ideally we have direct access to all the information to make our decision immediately. In reality we will likely have access to some, have to hunt for some, and have to rely on experience or guesswork when we cannot expend the time to collect or discover the gaps.

And of course, before we worry about the quality of that information, we have to be able to get to it. This remains the biggest blockage for user - actually getting access to information. Most information workers - 60% in recent survey by the economist - continue to lack access to the information they need to complete their tasks:

Source: “Enterprise Knowledge Workers: Understanding Risks and Opportunities” - available here 

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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