Friday, September 23, 2011

On human inability to make real-time decision

WW2, besides all the bad things it did to humanity, also accelerated thinking and technology in many areas, Winston Churchill's war room has advanced the methodology and practice of real-time decision making.  There are today many decision support systems that help decision makers to make quick decisions, however, Chris Webber from the Economist Intelligent Unit (EIU), who was one of the speakers in the Progress Software conference last week said that their studies show that the obstacle for getting quick decisions is the human decision maker that has difficulty to get quick decisions even if all information and decision support tools are available for that decision.    Maybe, in some circumstances, the human decision maker can be skipped and be replaced by an autonomic system that will be fed with goals and intentions and will make the actual decisions?    

3 comments:

Eran said...

I wonder about this perception. While missing many of the details, it seems that human beings are making real time decisions all the time. For example, in driving.

Opher Etzion said...

Hi Eran. Of course, people are making real-time decisions all the time, but I think that the article talked about decision makers with business organizations.

cheers,

Opher

Keith said...

Deciding what needs to be done based on a complex set of events is the age-old problem faced by all decision makers. IBM-Watson uses thousands of 'brains' to come to a rational decision. This capability when simplified to individual events comes down to the simple premis of a right-time-right-place-right-information scenario that can be enabled only with the ability of a human to set the ball rolling. Once many Simple-Event applications are in place it can be possible to filter the results by another layer of Event processing applications.