UPFRONT Decision overload?

With the information onslaught increasing both in intensity and complexity, business decision-making is in crisis, according to survey of top corporate leaders in the United States.
The third annual Teradata survey of senior business executives highlights the continuing trend of more complex decisions having to be made in less time and in the face of continually growing flood of data. Three quarters of respondents report that the number of daily decisions they make has increased from the previous year.
The increase in data has now been compounding for three consecutive years, according to Teradata. This year nearly all respondents reported an increase. More than half of the respondents said data has doubled or even tripled over the previous year and that decisions are more complex.
Julian Beavis, Teradata’s New Zealand-based vice president for India, SE Asia and Australasia, says the findings explain why companies are moving enterprise analytics to the top of their priority lists.
“The overwhelming majority of respondents, more than 70 percent, say poor decision-making is serious problem for business. The top casualties are profits, company reputation, long-term growth, employee morale, productivity and revenue.”
Other Teradata studies show the problem extends to Europe and China.
Beavis says this year’s data was split into two distinct groupings – those who rate their decision-making capabilities as excellent (decision champions) and those who rate their capabilities as poor (decision challenged). key difference is that 75 percent of the decision champions use centralised enterprise data warehouse compared to 19 percent of the decision challenged.
Teradata, division of NCR Corporation, is global leader in enterprise data warehousing and enterprise analytic technologies and services. Its survey reports can be found at www.teradata.com.