15.3 Go Gently Into that Dark Night
15.3 Go Gently Into that Dark Night As our IEBI symphony draws to a close, there is one note of caution. Throughout this book, we have tried to sort the hype from the fact. In Chapter 1, we asked if the praise of the Internet is factual or flights of fancy. We examined the rhetoric surrounding XML, whether it was the panacea for communication some claimed. Our discussions of Java and CWMI were focused on the reality of what we can deliver, not on the far-flung hyperbole of a marketing department with an overactive imagination . So, what about IEBI? Is it really the solution to remaining competitive in an Internet Enabled age? Well, yes. And no. Yes, in the sense that we are providing information to the decision maker, the crafter of our corporate strategy. Keep in mind, information is the meat upon which strategy feeds. If our strategy is based on solid, substantive information, we are in a much better position to develop a solid, winning strategy than if we didn't have this information. However, we are not guaranteed a successful and winning strategy. This is where the "no" comes in. The most critical element of the BI loop is the decision maker. In his book Investment Madness , John Nofsinger notes that "Psychologists have found that people become overconfident when they experience early success in a new activity. Also, having more information available and a higher degree of control leads to higher overconfidence. These factors are referred to as the illusion of knowledge and the illusion of control ." We must be aware that simply providing quality information will not necessarily make an organization more strategic. As system architects , we can provide all the information in a timely manner, but ultimately it is the decision maker who is responsible for making better decisions. Nofsinger goes on to say, "Because most individual investors lack the training and experience of professional investors, they are less equipped to know how to interpret information. They may think they have access to all this incredible inside information and that may well be true, but without the proper training, they cannot begin to guess how that information might shape the futureany more than they can guess future rolls of the die from what was rolled in the past." Analysis is so much more than providing multidimensional access to data; it is more than just determining the value of a particular KPI or the cost-object unit cost. Analysis is the ability to determine the nature of a thing. IEBI cannot do this. One might argue that data mining can perform this analysis, but this would be incorrect. Even in the case of data mining, there is always a human decision maker who evaluates the decisions being made by the automated process. A recommendation engine recommends products to a consumer who in turn makes the buy decision. We need to understand this concept. We need to understand that as IEBI system architects, our product is information, not better decisions. The consumer of that information, our customer, is the decision maker. If our organization is to be customer-driven, we must be as well. We must always keep our customer's needs and wants in mind in order to establish our own mutually beneficial relationship with our own customers.  |
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EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 113