What will business owe to the decision maker? How does the enterprise empower the decision maker inside the organization?
Companies are judged in so-called “Best Places to Work” lists based upon the things they give to employees like great health benefits, great work environments, flex time, daycare and whether there is a cappuccino maker in the break room. An interesting article this past week from CIO magazine points out the fact that 40% of executives trust their gut over their companies’ significant investment in Business Intelligence due to the fact that good data is not available or there is an inability to share information across the organization. This brings to the forefront the question; what does an organization owe the employee to help them make the best decisions possible for the business? Throughout this article Accenture and Aberdeen Research go on to confirm that employees lack the most basic of tools to make everyday decisions that contribute to the bottom line of the business. It seems assumed that the “job will get done” with simply good people who know their job. If those people in decision making capacities lack even the most basic tools how can they be expected to make the right decisions?
“The 61 percent of respondents that said ‘no good data was available on which to make decisions’ is striking, given the terabytes of internal and customer-related data available at most organizations today. It’s also, of course, indicative if the sad state of data management inside organizations. “
A decision is only as good as the data behind it. Today, more than ever before, each and every decision needs to be based in fact. The only way to accomplish this is for business to deliver information that can be acted upon at the time of decision. Business Intelligence as it exists today, the single version of the truth, does not support effective decision making. The “gut” represents the subjective and qualitative factors that business users have to gain trust that the enterprise is capturing along with the quantitative ones in creating the single version of the truth. Most BI implementations are based upon the notion that volume of data into a single repository provides that single version of the truth. Most still leave things out and thus degrade the truth…or at least omit some of it.
Businesses know this needs to change; needs to evolve. Business users have to gain transparency into the data in order to make decisions that achieve the goals of the business. Companies have a responsibility to give users the trust in the most basic of tools to do their job: data. Maybe the next “Best Places to Work” list that comes out will focus on trust rather than a cappuccino maker in the break room.
Tags: BI, data, employees, gut, single version of the truth