Blog: Richard Hackathorn

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IBM IOD/Gold - Tom Davenport

I did not want to miss the talk by Tom Davenport, an old friend from my days in academia. But I had to suffer though another blast from the LA All Stars. Am I showing my age? Is IBM legally responsible for hearing damage to the folks in the VIP section? Video on how information should be chasing us, rather than the reverse. Not bad! Punch line is "We can do this now!" What is this?

Robert LeBlanc, GM of Software Sales, opens on “What’s Your Information Agenda?” We need to optimized enterprise performance. Whether you are CEO, CFO, LOB, CIO all have the responsibility to drive innovation. He Global enterprise CEO expects substantial change (83%) and change in their business model (98%). Technical talent will come from new emerging countries. Corporate social responsibility has a positive impact on society, by 68% of the CEOs.

Sidenote: A quote that stuck me was “We are surprised by the impact that just a few consumers can have with their blog entries.” by Ron Hurlbut, CEO of Attune Corp. Hmmmm Is anyone reading this stuff? If so, please post a comment!

Robert introduced Tom Davenport, Professor of IT & Management at Babson College, and his research studies on the interaction of information and decision making. His title is Linking Information and Decisions: The Unfinished Agenda. Tom noted that we have made fantastic progress in storing and managing data, but progress over 20 years on decision support has been lacking.

Tom (who likes pies) sliced the information pie: decisions, control communication, processes. Heading toward a planetary realignment via: application agenda, automating processes, creating data, key unit is the transaction. Types of decisions researched: supply chains, etc. The results from these studies have found: wide range of decision perspectives, factors of structure level versus human-contribution level, difficulties of achieving One Version of Truth.

Tom suggested a pyramid figure with top-down levels for: Automated Decision – Structured Human – Loosely Coupled. [I am not buying the framework; too much is all mixed up] From bottom-up, proper requires are: info infrastructure to linkage to DP/behaviors to tight process/system integration. From bottom-up, technologies relevant: DW/analysis tools to scorecards/dashboard to workflow/rules/scoring. IBM is developing or acquiring all these technologies. Four-step decision sequence (which I missed because of a text message). Striving toward a Single Version of the Truth (SVT) is very expensive to do; hence, we need to deal with multiple versions of the truth.

Next was a panel with Noel Garry, Irish Life & Permanent, and Larry Williams, JM Family Enterprises . Good sketches of business challenges and how their specific information infrastructures were being remolded to support better decisions in specific processes. Putting together all the information is a prerequisite to decision support.

Robert wrapped up the session. What a great era! Why IBM? Answer offered: Global IT leader, technology innovation, proven solutions, industry focus.

My take on this. . . I was expecting a deeper exploration into the linkage of information to decisions. In particular, we need better thinking about allocating human judgment (involvement) to business processes. Tom touches on this. I would asset that ALL automated business process MUST have include some degree of human judgment. Anyone agree?

[Blog stream from IBM IOD/Gold October 2008 is here]

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