Data-Driven Decision Making

Last year, IBM formed a new services business unit focused on business analytics and optimization.  The stated focus was to “improve the speed and quality of business decisions.”  The goal is to promote information as a strategic asset and remove “gut feel” from managerial decision making and pushing for “fact based enterprises” that operate more on analytics than intuition.  The approach of the IBM business unit is to change the way that executive work as follows:

Traditional Approach > New Approach

Instinct and Intuition > Fact-driven;  Corrective > Directive;  Years, months, weeks > Hours, minutes, seconds;  Human insight > Applied semantics;  Decision Support > Action Support;  Efficient > Optimized

The business unit was kick-started via several acquisitions and was enhanced, yesterday, when IBM said it had agreed to pay $1.7 billion for Netezza Corp., a company, with 500 employees, that helps businesses sort through data on corporate servers.  The market reacted positively, with the shares of both companies rising. 

Making good decisions quickly has propelled many executives to superstardom within their companies.  Now it seems that one must be able to apply one’s business acumen with data to back it up, and still do it quickly and correctly, in order to rise within the organization.