Thursday, September 27, 2007
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FT.com / Technology - Personal view: Gut instincts give business intelligence a new flavour
FT.com / Technology - Personal view: Gut instincts give business intelligence a new flavour
Personal view: Gut instincts give business intelligence a new flavour
By Royce Bell
Published: July 11 2007 09:41 | Last updated: July 11 2007 09:41
It is official: we cannot cope with information overload – apparently, we are not designed to analyse large amounts of data and draw irrefutable conclusions.
This is according to Malcolm Gladwell*, a researcher in the latest developments of neuroscience and psychology. If the insights he describes are correct then there are profound implications for business intelligence (BI) and information management projects.
Mr Gladwell illustrates how humans “thin slice” the world: how too much choice inhibits our choosing; how we can be externally primed to think in a certain way; and what we mean by intuition. He also illustrates the insidious origins of bias – how we are programmed to allow ourselves to be influenced by events – even just words from the people around us.
The insights to our pre- programmed mental mechanisms go far beyond the old comparison of rising capacity seen in Moore’s computer law with flatline development in humans – it goes to the heart of any claims we in the business intelligence market may make on how we might improve decision making.
Thin slicing describes our unconscious ability to detect and process key information in our environment that allows us to make snap judgments or decisions. In a business environment, such unconscious decision-making creates problems – of accountability, repeatability, and perhaps most importantly, believability.
If business intelligence is about decisions, are companies’ systems simply there to present data so that staff can support their instinctive choices? Or do systems aggregate data in the hope that wisdom springs from the data warehouse? Is it a case of laying infrastructure on which others will build, or have systems really been designed around an analysis of what is actually needed to improve decision-making?
There is the argument that simply making information available must be a good thing – just examine the studies on how much time management spends looking for information. Research from Accenture, the management consultancy, has shown that a quarter of a manager’s day can be occupied with such searching. But Mr Gladwell describes how our decision-making freezes when faced with too much information, so we must look carefully at how much information is made available.
I believe that classifying the uses of BI is a good place to start in looking at the value to be had from the use of BI investments.
For a start, today’s technology is already up to the challenge of monitoring events and providing notifications – or even automating a response in straightforward cases. What we should focus on are decisions requiring human thought – and the need to guide and inform our intuitions.
Assuming management systems are efficient at flagging a need for action, we are left with an information set that constitutes the real value of BI: what information is used in deciding what to do?
Here, Mr Gladwell’s insights are useful. What he has brought from the human sciences addresses both the conscious and unconscious processes that go on in the mind. Although his book has been criticised as anti-analysis – even anti-thought – the critical insight I think he brings is that unconscious, snap, intuitive decisions are actually based upon our ability to bypass the analytic process.
Underlying this idea is the fact that accumulated experience, as well as information assembled without direct attention, does inform these oft-derided instincts. We classify these decisions as intuitive because we cannot provide the supporting analysis.
So where does that leave us? I think BI professionals need to develop a framework within their organisation’s information strategy that reserves a place for intuition.
Technology is not anathema to intuition – in fact, it can augment it. Tools are becoming available that allow unstructured information captured in the form of transactions, interactions, e-mail, text and a panoply of other media to be analysed and brought to bear on a wide range of decisions – more decisions than human intuition alone can hope to address.
Researchers at Accenture Technology Labs have been developing tools that use such sources to build models of everything from shoppers and salespeople to buses and vineyards to industrialise informed decision-making in such diverse areas as supply chain, marketing, and healthcare.
For now, the critical question for such a framework is how to apply tools and methods to tease out what is really used in decision-making – to extract the process from the mystery.
But if the BI professional begins with the notion that intuition is simply another evolutionary step in fact-based decision-making, rather than outlawing it, we may start to see the next level of return on investment and an advance in management’s use of BI.
Beyond Mr Gladwell’s world are vistas of neuroscience research into consciousness, memory, attention – all of which provide insights into how we work. In particular, this research can guide us on the social aspects of decision-making and how humans respond to an ever-changing world in real time – and this must also produce insights into how a business can respond to a chaotic world.
The dream of artificial intelligence foreseen by many sci-fi writers may be unattainable, but I think we can start to see the basis for real knowledge-based systems. It will be a world in which business intelligence drives and informs action in a work environment; less about spreadsheets and more about allowing humans to work in the way that 300m years of evolution have prepared them for.
*Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell, is published by Penguin
Royce Bell is chief executive officer at Accenture Information Management Services
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Personal view: Gut instincts give business intelligence a new flavour
By Royce Bell
Published: July 11 2007 09:41 | Last updated: July 11 2007 09:41
It is official: we cannot cope with information overload – apparently, we are not designed to analyse large amounts of data and draw irrefutable conclusions.
This is according to Malcolm Gladwell*, a researcher in the latest developments of neuroscience and psychology. If the insights he describes are correct then there are profound implications for business intelligence (BI) and information management projects.
Mr Gladwell illustrates how humans “thin slice” the world: how too much choice inhibits our choosing; how we can be externally primed to think in a certain way; and what we mean by intuition. He also illustrates the insidious origins of bias – how we are programmed to allow ourselves to be influenced by events – even just words from the people around us.
The insights to our pre- programmed mental mechanisms go far beyond the old comparison of rising capacity seen in Moore’s computer law with flatline development in humans – it goes to the heart of any claims we in the business intelligence market may make on how we might improve decision making.
Thin slicing describes our unconscious ability to detect and process key information in our environment that allows us to make snap judgments or decisions. In a business environment, such unconscious decision-making creates problems – of accountability, repeatability, and perhaps most importantly, believability.
If business intelligence is about decisions, are companies’ systems simply there to present data so that staff can support their instinctive choices? Or do systems aggregate data in the hope that wisdom springs from the data warehouse? Is it a case of laying infrastructure on which others will build, or have systems really been designed around an analysis of what is actually needed to improve decision-making?
There is the argument that simply making information available must be a good thing – just examine the studies on how much time management spends looking for information. Research from Accenture, the management consultancy, has shown that a quarter of a manager’s day can be occupied with such searching. But Mr Gladwell describes how our decision-making freezes when faced with too much information, so we must look carefully at how much information is made available.
I believe that classifying the uses of BI is a good place to start in looking at the value to be had from the use of BI investments.
For a start, today’s technology is already up to the challenge of monitoring events and providing notifications – or even automating a response in straightforward cases. What we should focus on are decisions requiring human thought – and the need to guide and inform our intuitions.
Assuming management systems are efficient at flagging a need for action, we are left with an information set that constitutes the real value of BI: what information is used in deciding what to do?
Here, Mr Gladwell’s insights are useful. What he has brought from the human sciences addresses both the conscious and unconscious processes that go on in the mind. Although his book has been criticised as anti-analysis – even anti-thought – the critical insight I think he brings is that unconscious, snap, intuitive decisions are actually based upon our ability to bypass the analytic process.
Underlying this idea is the fact that accumulated experience, as well as information assembled without direct attention, does inform these oft-derided instincts. We classify these decisions as intuitive because we cannot provide the supporting analysis.
So where does that leave us? I think BI professionals need to develop a framework within their organisation’s information strategy that reserves a place for intuition.
Technology is not anathema to intuition – in fact, it can augment it. Tools are becoming available that allow unstructured information captured in the form of transactions, interactions, e-mail, text and a panoply of other media to be analysed and brought to bear on a wide range of decisions – more decisions than human intuition alone can hope to address.
Researchers at Accenture Technology Labs have been developing tools that use such sources to build models of everything from shoppers and salespeople to buses and vineyards to industrialise informed decision-making in such diverse areas as supply chain, marketing, and healthcare.
For now, the critical question for such a framework is how to apply tools and methods to tease out what is really used in decision-making – to extract the process from the mystery.
But if the BI professional begins with the notion that intuition is simply another evolutionary step in fact-based decision-making, rather than outlawing it, we may start to see the next level of return on investment and an advance in management’s use of BI.
Beyond Mr Gladwell’s world are vistas of neuroscience research into consciousness, memory, attention – all of which provide insights into how we work. In particular, this research can guide us on the social aspects of decision-making and how humans respond to an ever-changing world in real time – and this must also produce insights into how a business can respond to a chaotic world.
The dream of artificial intelligence foreseen by many sci-fi writers may be unattainable, but I think we can start to see the basis for real knowledge-based systems. It will be a world in which business intelligence drives and informs action in a work environment; less about spreadsheets and more about allowing humans to work in the way that 300m years of evolution have prepared them for.
*Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell, is published by Penguin
Royce Bell is chief executive officer at Accenture Information Management Services
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Cognos to Acquire Applix to Bolster CPM Suite and BI
Cognos to Acquire Applix to Bolster CPM Suite and BI
Cognos would gain technology to improve its corporate performance management and business intelligence suites with the proposed acquisition of Applix. But this deal creates short-term uncertainty about product strategy.
Cognos would gain technology to improve its corporate performance management and business intelligence suites with the proposed acquisition of Applix. But this deal creates short-term uncertainty about product strategy.
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