I'm pushing this so hard because I have long observed that in the most important decisions--whether in personal life or in business--we often trust our "gut feel", our intuition over measurable facts.  How many of us are purely rational in our decision making?  Even if we do make a list of pros and cons, because our weighting system is at best invented on the spot or at worst non-existent, we often end up at least as confused as when we started.  Or is this just my experience?  Well, yes, because I haven't carried out that survey...

Am I saying that BI is useless?  No, not at all.  Simply, that like every other tool, it's good for some things but not for others.  And if you can accept that, it follows that we need to expand the scope of what we do in decision making support.  The name "business intelligence" seems far too rational and limited for what the type of support that most decision makers need when making decisions.  For me, one of the most important trends in the past year or two has been the focus on the social aspect of decision making, as pioneered by Lyza, but now promoted by pretty much every BI vendor.  However, social networking support means a lot more than allowing comments or discussions on reports, dashboards and various visualizations.  It actually means providing a comprehensive, coherent environment where all interactions around a particular decision are recorded and tracked.  And, the last time I checked, much of that interaction occurs before the data crunching starts, and another chunk long after the BI tool has been shut down.  Decision making support needs to go far wider than the majority of BI vendors even imagine.

So, am I predicting that 2012 will be the year when BI tools finally "get it" that they are not the center of the decision maker's universe?  When BI vendors stop adding social networking bells and whistles to their tools and instead figure out how to be part of a larger Enterprise 2.0 effort unifying all social interactions around conversations, documents, analyses and more within the organization?

No, I don't think I can predict the future.  What I can say is that it's up to you to make your future, and one area where technology, both hardware and software, is rapidly improving is social networking support.  It would therefore be valuable to give some serious thought and focus in 2012 to how you could support collaborative decision making in the coming few years.