Appropriate information choices are critical to decision making. This is a strategic issue for companies. Regardless whether the decisions are being made with lots of number crunching or simply gut level intuition, information choices are important. Where, how, and what information is available in an organization plays a formal role for managers. Obviously, the internet has changed easy access to some information. Additional questions revolve around where managers will look for information: internal or external.
The following articles bring together several different perspectives relative to being able to make decisions and how decisions are made.
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- Analysis of Paralysis By: Dan Heath and Chip Heath (Fast Company, Nov 2007). If your strategy doesn't help employees act, it's not a strategy. "Keep it simple, stupid." That's the advice every executive has received on how to share strategy with employees. The subtext is often, "Keep it simple, because your people are stupid." But you don't need to embrace simplicity just so your people can comprehend your message. The point of simplicity is more fundamental: Simplicity allows people to act. An underlying tenet is that decision making is difficult in most circumstances - having a strategy or principles from which to operate provides a frame of reference for framing decisions.
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- Going for the Gut By: Rob Walker (Fast Company, Nov 2007). Our heroes may crunch the numbers, but we like them to play their hunches. In the recent book Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer makes the case for intuition. Curiously, many assessments of the book took for granted that his arguments, familiar to readers of Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, cut against conventional wisdom--that trusting intuition is, in fact, counterintuitive. ... Who idolizes the plodding studiers of spreadsheets? Nobody. The most widely celebrated heroes of capitalism are the Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, or Mark Cuban types--the ones who scorn what the focus groups and the gurus say and follow their superior instincts into the highest possible tax bracket. Even corporate honchos whose success has had much to do with number crunching know that the rest of us look up to those who defy the odds, not those who play them. ... There is a bit of the obvious, even of irreverence of data analysis - but it certainly is a side of analysis to consider. Intuition!
- Aetna's Joseph Zubretsky by Lori Calabro (CFO Magazine, Aug 2008) Heavy investment in technology goes straight to the company's bottom line, the CFO says. ...Internally, Aetna is rationalizing costs through technology investments that predict medical trends and give consumers the data necessary to make prudent health-care choices. The article is written in Q&A format, but the underlying theme is the use of information for decision making and linking the appropriate IT to the corporate strategy. A couple of other examples:
- Your IT systems are so integral to your strategy that your CEO describes Aetna as a health-care insurance/technology company. How does IT help control health-care costs? Our whole strategy is built around information and making sure consumers truly understand the cost of health care.
- To produce that information, Aetna invests many millions of dollars annually. Do those investments produce better financial returns? The answer is absolutely yes. Our systems help us forecast medical trends and maintain internal vigilance over the financial and operational complexities of this business. We have a platform that provides incredible insights into how medical trends behave across all of our customer segments, geographies, and product lines.
2008-08-02
Tags: information - data - DecisionMaking
Back to BlogNotes-August2008
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I will persist until I succeed.
Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult. I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking.
Og Mandino
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