Business intelligence, or simply noise?

With such easy access to information these days the problem that decision-makers face is not one of knowledge supply, but rather one of sense making.

It's not what you know, but rather what picture becomes clearer.

An excess of knowledge supply without a good program of sense-making can quickly overwhelm the mental bandwidth of an organisation.

An uncontrolled pipeline of information simply creates a state of reactionary chaos.

If business intelligence is to practically serve as a strategic asset for an organisation's decision-making capacity, then knowledge supply needs to be filtered and categorised and processed in a way that makes it practical.

Rather than jumping from one trend to the next in a haphazard way, an organisation committed to ongoing learning processes knowledge into insights that inform strategy and innovation.

This process is ongoing.

So much money and time and energy is being wasted by organisations who react to change without a properly structured program of business intelligence. It seems crazy to us that this is the case, but perhaps the perceived fear-of-missing-out is a strong distraction during these changing times.

Noise carries a real cost.