Decision making and Big Data

(1) The essential phenomenon of business is decision making. The act of making a decision consists of selecting one course of action or strategy among the set of admissible strategies. Decision making feeds on information and the fundamental of information is data. The availability of the network of networks (the web or internet) has moved information gathering, storing, retrieving, analyzing, summarizing and dismantling to a new level. The business intelligence (BI) is like an application (APP) that allows organization to use data in the form of information to make business decisions in the context of social technical system (STS).

Discuss how BI changes the way decisions are made in and organization and what it means overall with respect to the implementation of business strategy. Also, briefly describe the role of STS in implementing BI driven decision-making.

(2) One of the hottest trends in current enterprise information systems is what's often referred to as "big data" -- that is, giant databases of stuff gathered from customers (e.g., all the information about your supermarket purchases automatically entered each time you swipe your Von's or Safeway card through the checkout to get all those cool discounts), websurfing, suppliers, internal monitoring, etc. Big Data was first enabled through the enormous increases in the availability of low-cost data storage (down to $30 per terabyte at Fry's Electronics, as of today's paper), but it took the development of good data analytic tools to really spark the trend (if you're interested, here's a good summary of the issues in Big Data but it's not compulsory.)

So the question for discussion basically is to what degree ought organizational decision making to be driven by "evidence" derived from analysis of trends in Big Data? Are such data reliable? How much power might the analyst have over the results? What other kinds of information, if any, might be used for decision making? Big Data's not going away -- in fact, "Huge Data" may be just around the corner -- so how can we best harness this new horse to the enterprise so that it doesn't run away with everything?