MASSIVE amounts of data pour into systems and servers of businesses every day, Managing both the relevance and usefulness of data can overwhelm decision makers, as well as those who prepare reports and studies for C-suite executives. This is why 85 percent of business leaders surveyed in an Oracle commissioned study would prefer a robot (or AI) to make decisions for them.
The study called ‘Decision Dilema’ by Oracle and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a New York Times bestselling author surveyed some 14,000 employees and business leaders across 17 countries, including 4,500 respondents from Japan and Asia Pacific (JAPAC) with several respondents from the Philippines, and found that people “are struggling to make decisions in their personal and professional lives at a time when they are being forced to make more decisions than ever before.”
The study concludes that people feel overwhelmed and under qualified to use data to make decisions and “this is hurting their quality of life and business performance.”
“The amount of data we all need to sift through is just overwhelming,” Chris Chelliah, senior vice president, technology and customer strategy of Oracle told a small group of information technology editors from JAPAC via a virtual conference. He pointed out how 33 percent of those surveyed from the region do not know which data or sources to trust and 71 percent have given up on making a decision because the data was overwhelming.
The descriptor for this condition is ‘decision distress.” It is a form of insecurity, regretting and feeling guilty about, or questioning a decision they made in the past year. This was usually because of an inability to properly manage or harness all the data available at their disposal. In JAPAC alone, 87 percent of business leaders have suffered from this condition. However, 90 percent believe having the right type of decision intelligence can make or break the success of an organization
Business leaders in JAPAC want data to help and know it is critical to the success of their organizations, but do not believe they have the tools to be successful which is eroding their confidence and ability to make timely decisions.
This is simply because the number of decisions being made is multiplying exponentially and people are overwhelmed by the amount of data that needs to be used to either calculate, interpret or consolidate to come up with a correct conclusion. Wrong decisions from mismanaged data damages trust, making decisions much more complicated, and negatively impacting their quality of life, the study reveals.
Seventy four percent of people say the number of decisions they make every day has increased 10 times over the last three years and as they try to make these decisions, 75 percent are getting bombarded with more data from more sources than ever before.
“The hesitancy, distrust, and lack of understanding of data shown by this study align with what we hear from customers rethinking their approach to decision making,” Chelliah said referring to Oracle solutions to data management. “Our customers are looking for help to connect data to insight to decision to action. With our span of connected cloud capabilities, ranging from foundational data management, to augmented and applied analytics, to our suite of operational applications, we are uniquely positioned to meet this need and help our customers in the region achieve business success,”
The study revealed that 96 percent want help from data.
“In an ideal world, they want data to help them: make better decisions (43 percent), reduce risk (37 percent), make faster decisions (40 percent), make more money (37 percent), and plan for the unexpected (30 percent),” the study enumerated.
Christian Horner, Team Principal and CEO at Oracle Red Bull Racing compared the importance of relevant and useful data to that which is used by Oracle’s winning F1 team in creating race strategies.
“When our drivers are racing at more than 320 km per hour, they have to make critical decisions very quickly. The correct race strategy decisions like when to pit and which tires are best for the conditions on the track can mean the difference between winning and losing,” Horner, said.
“With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, our team can take advantage of data by running billions of race strategy simulations during a Grand Prix weekend, ensuring that we make the best decisions in response to the performance of the cars, changes happening on the track, and the actions of our competitors during the race,” he added.
But collecting and interpreting data requires software and hardware. Manually gathering and processing this data has driven people in JAPAC to their breaking point at a time when the stakes are incredibly high for business leaders. One immediate measure of this data driven ‘illness’ is that 78 percent of people in the study say the headache of having to collect so much data and interpret it is too much for them to handle.
As a result, 92 percent have changed the way they make decisions over the last three years. 41 percent now only listen to sources they trust and only 31 percent rely solely on gut feelings.
Interestingly, 75 percent of business leaders say people often make decisions and then look for the data to justify them, while 74 percent of employees believe businesses often put the highest paid person’s opinion ahead of data, and 26 percent of JAPAC respondents feel that most decisions made in business are not rational.
The situation is so challenging that 81 percent of people–and 85 percent of business leaders–would prefer for all these difficulties to just go away and to have a robot make their decisions. Despite their frustrations with data in their personal and professional worlds, people know that without data their decisions would be less accurate (45 percent), less successful (32 percent), and more prone to error (41 percent).
People also believe that an organization that uses technology to make data-driven decisions is more trustworthy (77 percent), will be more successful (77 percent), is a company they are more likely to invest in (75 percent), partner with (75 percent), and work for (76 percent).
“Business leaders in Asia Pacific are increasingly aware of the role quality data and analytics can play in uncovering deep market and customer insights, disrupting legacy business, and even transforming whole industries,” said Dr. Chris Marshall, Research VP at IDC.