Managers not embracing changes towards making data driven decisions must act fast or be replaced according to McAfee and Brynjolfsson in their 2012 article on big data.
Organisations describing themselves as data driven have been shown to out perform others in both financial and organisational KPIs. With such obvious evidence of the performance benefits of becoming big data enabled, McAfee and Brynjolfsson expect managers making decisions based on experience and intuition to need to take a back seat and let the data do the talking for future success.
Of course, successful decision making is already based on analytics in many organisations, but McAfee and Brynjolfsson describe a change towards big data as an expansion in all dimensions. Big data is increasing in volume, ever nearing real time and in a vast variety of media, which can make it extremely difficult to manage.
For many organisations a move towards big data represents a substantial change in decision making processes and as with any change, it is important that such a transition is managed effectively. McAfee and Brynjolfsson devised their own list of management challenges in this change process; leadership, talent management, technology, decision making and company culture
McAfee and Brynjolfsson claim that Sears Holdings have sucessfully reduced the time it takes to plan promotions, making them more timely, granular and personalised, all with the use of big data.
Moving forward it would be really interesting to find out how firms adopting big data have dealt with these challenges. In this article, Phil Shelley, CTO of Sears Holdings says he is surprised at how easy the transition was for them.
For more information please read the article:
McAfee, A. & Brynjolfsson, E. (2012) Big Data: the management revolution, Harvard Business Review Vol. 90, No. 10, pp 60-66