We all have seen the ocean of dashboards. Some of the concept videos are filled with war rooms filled with screens. We want to pull value from the data that we possess and that’s why we hoard data even more than is needed. We craft dashboards one after another and spend thousands of hours in the process thinking that the wisdom is there and we’ll find it if we have enough lenses to the data. Yet the dashboards are just windows to the current state and tell us how’s the business going on, how are we performing in development, what is the level of data literacy in our company or how is the customer behaving on our new shiny platform to mention a few.
We craft dashboards one after another and spend thousands of hours in the process thinking that the wisdom is there and we’ll find it if we have enough lenses to the data.
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Becoming truly data-driven is possible
Yet we keep on talking about being or needing to become data-driven and make decisions based on data. And after the presentations and nice stage talks we go back to the good old traditional PowerBI dashboard. Drawing your conclusions and deciding actions after looking at a dozen dashboards is in fact data-driven decision making. That’s nice, but not enough. You should not settle for that. Not anymore.
Dare to ask why and what should be done
Dashboards at best give you predictions. I stress that it is at best since still too often dashboard is just a rearview mirror to the past. But as we all know the big questions in decision making is why this has happened and what should be done now? The reasoning behind the questions is that:
you want to be the driver, not sit in the backseat.
You want to make your future and be proactive, not just react.
You want to make your markets instead of using the opportunities created by segment leader companies.
What you need is decision intelligence.
Decision intelligence - eyes front
What is decision intelligence? Decision intelligence is the ability to use relevant and available data to identify and explain optimal actions that improve business outcomes. It is not about letting the AI take over. This is not a terminator movie. But we still love you, Big Arnold.
If the dashboard gives you crunched overview of the situation now, then the decision intelligence provides the reasoning why and actionable decision recommendations. Decision Intelligence is your eyes front. Decision intelligence is based on data, on facts, on the amount of data we humans are not capable of managing and analyzing. This is the first reason we need to harness machines to do the heavy lifting for us.
Solve the last mile of analytics
Making your decisions based on pure guts is highly questionable as we have learned from Kahneman’s Noble prize-worthy thinking described in Thinking Fast and Slow. We’re so self-confident in our rationality that we think all our decisions are well-considered. In reality, our minds are riddled with biases leading to poor decision-making. We ignore data that we don't see, and we weigh evidence inappropriately. This is the second reason we need help making wiser and more profitable decisions. In short, we humans suck in the “last mile of analytics” as professionals at Diwo nicely puts it.
This is where decision intelligence can help us. Decision Intelligence solutions provided for example by Diwo.ai provide us multiple benefits:
First, get actionable recommendations in minutes by fully automating and augmenting your analytics workflow
Second, deliver immediate and measurable business value with dynamically generated AI-powered recommendations to support business outcomes
Third, close the decision gap with help of automated decision-making while keeping a human in the loop
Diwo.ai approach to decision intelligence. Check out the video from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1Pine2ROXk
Data products increase decision accuracy
Ask yourself, while drinking my morning coffee, would you like to see from the dashboard what happened last week or would you like to see 3 fact-based decision recommendations with the reason why? The answer might be both and sometimes the biggest value creator is the combination of the two. It's a circle alike process. Keep the dashboards in use since you have poured millions of dollars into those.
Before we wrap up, I want to remind you that you should put focus on the quality of the data you add to the decision-making process. If you input crap, the output is mostly crap as well. Low-quality data results in poor decision recommendations. This is where data productizement becomes handy and that is exactly in which we excel at Data Product Business. There's even a freshly written book about it - Deliver Value in the Data Economy
We can conclude that decision intelligence is not about giving the decisions to AI. It is about helping us humans to make more accurate, profitable, and responsible contextualized decisions faster than ever.