Taking care of business blind spots

Businesses are compromising their strategic planning by basing decisions only on data easily accessible within their formal, corporate information systems, and should ask themselves if they are indeed fully prepared for organisational decision-making in a complex and changing environment. New visual analytic technologies enable them to explore the totality of information available and simultaneously uncover the relationships that exist within this mass of data.

Dr Herman van Niekerk, director of knowledge management and competitive intelligence at Suritec, says the recent disclosure of sensitive and classified information by WikiLeaks about the United States war in Afghanistan, and the current discussions on the Protection of Information Bill in South Africa, have once again highlighted the important role that information plays in government, society and business.

Thomas Jefferson once said that information is the currency of democracy. While this is true for broader society, it is also true for business executives who need to take decisions to stay ahead of the competition, to avoid risk and to ensure the long-term sustainability of their organisation. Most of these decisions are based on known facts. However, in making these vital strategic decisions, how much of the unknown information is taken into account?

Van Niekerk argues that businesses are often compromising their strategic  planning by basing decisions only on data easily accessible within their formal, corporate information systems. It is universally accepted that about 80% of information that one needs in order to make decisions about developments in the external business environment, is openly available. Such, mostly unstructured information, collected from external sources, can provide necessary cues to give corporate strategists and executives forewarning of opportunities or impending organisational failure.

However, too many businesses turn a blind eye to the unknowns in their total environment. There are a number of reasons for this behaviour, ranging from the difficulty to collect and analyse this kind of information, to the absence of organisational structures and processes geared to optimise information assets.

Only 20% of the total information of a business is held in a structured format. This structured data resides in data warehouses and enterprise systems. Over the past few years, a significant amount of money has been spent by businesses on developing business intelligence and management information systems to analyse this information. It is relatively easy to develop systems that have causality as a platform. Executives then make rational decisions based only on underlying information, and in the process ignoring other potential sources of information.

Most business environments are complex, and quantitatively orientated systems cannot cope with this complexity because they do not allow for unstructured data. As a result, executives have not been able to reappraise their views based on what is happening in the external environment. This creates business blind spots, specifically when it comes to strategy.

Basing decisions on 20% of the data is a severe constraint, but it is by taking the 80% of unstructured data into account that executives can leap ahead of the competition.

Until now it has been difficult to develop software that analyses unstructured data. And, until recently, it has been exceedingly difficult to link structured to unstructured data. However, new visual analytic technologies enable organisations to explore the totality of information available to them and simultaneously uncover the relationships that exist within this mass of data.

Visual information systems enable companies to uncover key relationships hidden in large, complex, dynamic information sets. Unlike other technologies, visual information systems can integrate structured, unstructured, spatial and multimedia data simultaneously, making it possible to develop scenarios and to identify patterns, trends and warning signals.

Information about economic, technical and environmental trends resides in unstructured data, yet organisations seldom look at that. Often, even information within the organisation - such as e-mail - is not properly analysed and shared. Insight into this information improves and accelerates the decision-making process and ensures you can motivate the decisions you make.

Making sense of unstructured data further provides good early warning about your environment. You can never know the future, but you can look at scenarios in your organisation and find indicators that give you an idea of which scenario is unfolding, allowing you to adapt your strategy to fit what is playing out in the environment.

Take, as an example, a possible conflict of interest in a tender procedure. An analyst could spend more than two weeks going through Internet data and looking for linkages. Visual analytic software sorts through masses of documents in a short time and indicates connections. In this way, it enables the organisation to be much more accurate in its analysis of competitive activities.

Ultimately, it is about developing the agility and skills to be competitive in a world of information overload and globalisation. Business executives, particularly in South Africa, need to take notice of developments and emerging new technologies in the field of information analysis and decision-making. It will certainly assist them in improving their decision-making capability both in terms of quality and timeliness.