Blog: Craig Schiff

« Hyperion's Controversial Upgrade Fee | Main | Interest in Master Data Management Runs High »

New Decision Support System: Crowds

At a recent business performance management conference they had James Surowiecki as a speaker. He is the author of a book entitled 'The Wisdom of Crowds'. The fundamental pricnicple is this: if you take a diverse group of individuals and aggregate and average their input, you will get a better answer than just relying on any one individual, even an expert on the topic being discussed. I of course was skeptical at first, but he provided many examples to prove his point. The theory appears to work on everything from determining how many jelly beans are in a jar to forecasting future outcomes of today's business decisions. His hour-long speech from that event is now available here as an MP3 file (it's large, best to right-click and save target as). You can decide for yourself if it makes sense. If he's right, we probably need to change the way most business decision making is done, regardless of the underlying software and data warehouses that provide the information needed to make those decisions.

Share: