BI and Poor Decision making

Good Decision/Bad Decision

This has been something of a preoccupation for me of late. We spend much of our time debating the technologies. We invest valuable time in deciding if we should we go with mega-vendors (IBM, Oracle, SAP) or a challenger? We agonise over should it be cloud or on-premises, mart or warehouse, dimensional or relational? And it is all, frankly academic if the businesses is not making good decisions.

There is no shortage of material that try and make sense of why good people and great businesses make monumentally bad decisions. In the book ‘Thing Again:Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions’ by Sydney Finkelstein, Jo Whitehead and Andrew Cambell the focus is on the strategic decisions that have dramatic and highly visible consequences for the organisation.

Good People in Great Organisations Can Make Poor Decisions

An example is one of the UK’s premier retailers Boots which enjoys one of the largest footfalls in the UK. Established in the 19th century, it is now a subsidiary of £20billion Alliance Boots. In September 1998, the Chief Executive, Steve Russell excitedly announced a range of healthcare offerings including dentistry, chiropody and laser hair removal. Five years later, the initiative had lost in the region of £100m and Boots needed to break open the piggy bank and look down the back of the sofa for another £50m just to close down the operation and convert that premier retail space back to being … retail. It almost goes without saying that the changes were implemented by a new CEO, Richard Baker.

Apparently, one of the chief reasons for making the move into Healthcare services was  that a slowdown in the Beauty business ‘had been detected’. However a spokesman was later quoted in the Telegraph as saying that ‘they recognised that these areas are still growing strongly’.

Let’s stop there for a second. Spotting trends in sales and revenue by product category is probably marketing and business 101. And even the most rudimentary business intelligence solution should be trending sales over time. Yet the trend in sales in a key category for Boots was diagnosed as slowdown and only a few months later as growth. Of course, the slowdown may have been a short-term blip but the point of trending is to smooth these out for the purpose of longer-term planning. And, the error in trending might be more understandable had it not been for the fact that the later growth was characterised as ‘strong’.

Of course, I am not on the board of Boots and I have an advantage shared with all those analysts and commentator that put the boot (or should that be Boots) into Mr Russell … hindsight. Indeed, it’s a testimony to the strength of Boots as a high street giant that they can make major booboo’s and still go on to survive and thrive.

The Problem with Decisions …

And organisations are complex systems of individuals and interactions. Large organisations are very complex. This is why organisational decision making doesn’t always stand up to the scrutiny of us as individuals who retrospectively try and apply the logic of rational decision making to such mistakes.

There are a number of problems associated with individuals making decisions. Individuals have bias, self-interest, pre-conceptions. There are also a number of problems with organisational decisions. Groups have to manage conflict, disagreement and there are dynamics that can produce undesirable outcomes like Groupthink.

Today BI’s only Contribution is a Report, Chart or Dashboard

So if we accept that the purpose of Business Intelligence is to help organisations make better decisions (surely there is no debate here?) then Business Intelligence applications have to be more than reports, dashboards and charts.

They need to make decisions easier to collaborate around, they need to link decisions directly to the information that is required to make them. Furthermore decisions need to be open, transparent, accountable not just for the regulators but so that the whole organisation can buy into them.