Finding a cure for analysis paralysis
Jinfo Blog

4th August 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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What do the iPod, the transistor radio and Miracle Whip mayonnaise have in common? Answer: they were all launched during recessions and helped their respective companies – Apple, Texas Instruments and Kraft – to industry leading positions. ‘The best time to make big decisions to grab market share and drive growth may be now – a time when many companies are distracted, timid or confused’, says a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit. And developing a process to gather and analyse information, and distribute it to the right levels of the organisation, is crucial. Based on a survey of 229 senior executives worldwide, the report – Management Magnified: Getting Ahead in a Recession by Making Better Decisions (http://digbig.com/5badgj) – found an almost even split between those who said that their company needed to make better use of internal information (29%) as opposed to external (28%). And more than half also said that, over the past year, the types of information required to make decisions were weighted differently than they had been before. In a recession, a lot of it is about customers; 53% of respondents said that information about shifts in customer attitudes had become more important than before in making major decisions, compared with only 27% who were worried about the information manager’s staple, the actions of competitors. Respondents were also aware of the growing value of ‘non-traditional’ sources such as social networks – an interesting counterweight to the recent Deloitte survey on the reputational risks that social networks pose (details at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e22493). However there was an inherent tension between amassing information and exercising decisive leadership; the threat of ‘analysis paralysis’ grew as sources of information proliferated. Companies should not just expand their information, the EIU advises, but should also develop a taxonomy to help classify, analyse and distribute it – and should think about re-weighting different types of information by their degree of importance to the final outcome. All this should be music to the ears of information managers battling to persuade top decision makers that their professionalism pays dividends – especially as the report also concludes that such activity doesn’t necessarily require sophisticated technology, just a collective understanding of the company’s strategy and corporate culture. But there’s currently no guarantee that they’ll be heard; of the 229 senior respondents, only 9% claimed any responsibility for information and research. Add to this the finding from a recent Forbes report that more than half of C-suite executives prefer to locate information for themselves (details at http://www.vivavip.com/go/e21429) and you could argue that information managers are losing out. However the EIU report’s findings suggest that, in many companies, it may be the decision makers who are missing the trick.

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