Don’t “Blink” just yet…
By 
I am a fan of Malcolm Gladwell just as much as the next guy. His book “Blink” was insightful and introduced a topic that many of us think about, but perhaps don’t really ponder. Obviously we all make snap judgments, we all respond to a situation with the ability to react quickly. We are physically wired that way to ensure survival. Considering all that is thrown at us today, much of it not life-threatening (as our body was created for) what is the real value of those ‘gut reactions’? My teachers always told me that your first guess on a multiple choice question was usually the right one. (Of course, they also told me that Columbus discovered America, but I digress). The point is –what is the true value of BI & Analytics if our first instinct is usually the right one? Or, have we reached a point in our business evolution that a radical shift in decision processing is at hand?
There has been a lot of discussion about this topic lately, prompted by the article “To Hell with Business Intelligence: 40 Percent of Execs trust Gut” by Thomas Wailgum . I don’t believe that Thomas thinks that BI isn’t a valuable pursuit, it’s just that it hasn’t reached its full potential. And, as the article clearly points out, the organizations that primarily rely on their “gut” to make decisions are still striving to make informed decisions with BI & analytics. One very telling quote was from Starbuck’s CEO Stephen Gillett; “We still have a lot of decisions based on real-time data, intuition, or historical trends. I think in today’s economic climate, having strong analytic and BI-based decision making can help give a new dimension to that.”
Perhaps we have reached a point where it is survival of the fittest, and the ‘fittest’ in our context are companies & the executives that understand and seek out analytics to support decision making. Otherwise, we may all be getting our Latte’s from McDonalds (gasp).
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