They say businesses thrive on data. The simple logic is, the more the data the better. But is that really the case?
A recent study published by Oracle proves otherwise. This massive study titled “The Decision Dilemma” by Oracle and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, New York Times bestselling author, surveyed 14,000 employees and business leaders across 17 countries.
Some of its findings are quite a revelation. For example, 86% surveyed said that the volume of data is making decisions in their personal and professional lives much more complicated. So much so, that a thumbing 70% of the people admit that they have given up on making a decision because the data was too overwhelming.
The decision dilemma, as expected, is reflecting equally strongly on business decision-making too. 85% of business leaders have suffered from decision distress—regretting, feeling guilty about, or questioning a decision they made in the past year.
That sounds like an archetypal leadership conflict.
But is the availability and accessibility of data helping these leaders make better and quicker decisions? But the contrary is true, with 91%
of business leaders reporting that the growing number of data sources has limited the success of their organizations. In fact, 73% even admit their lack of trust in data has stopped them from making any decision at all.
A vicious cycle?
The study indicates that these challenges lead to new set of problems within the decision-making process – making a decision first and then looking for data to support it, or putting the highest-paid person’s opinion ahead of data.
This love-hate relationship with data is visible across the survey, with 97% of people wanting help from data and yet get frustrated due to the overload it. The study also specifically highlights the fact that a significant number of business leaders (87%) in India would prefer for all these difficulties to just go away and to have a robot make their decisions.
“People are drowning in data,” said Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, data scientist and author of Everybody Lies and Don’t Trust Your Gut. “This study highlights how the overwhelming amount of inputs a person gets in their average day — internet searches, news alerts, unsolicited comments from friends — frequently add up to more information than the brain is configured to handle. People are tempted to throw out the confusing, and sometimes conflicting, data and just do what feels right. But this can be a big mistake. It has been proven over and over again that our instincts can lead us astray and the best decision-making is done with a proper understanding of the relevant data. Finding a way to get a handle on the stream of data at their fingertips, to help businesses distinguish between the signal and the noise, is a crucial first step.”
The study summarizes that technology plays a key role decluttering the data-driven decision making process to a large extent. “The message is overwhelmingly clear—our current approach to managing and analyzing data must change. Especially in the business world. The benefits of getting it right span from attracting talent in a difficult job market, to gaining new investors in a tough economic climate,” underlines the study.
[…] “Data is the foundation of any AI project. Every organization has petabytes of data, but very few of them have data sets which can be used for machine learning. One analogy that I often use is, if data is the crude oil, machine learning models are like the fighter jets. Unfortunately, fighter jets cannot run on crude oils. They need specialized fuel to fly. Organizations need to set up ‘refineries’ that can convert the ‘crude oil’ into different fuels, which can then be used in fighter jets,” he says. […]