Good enough?
March 16, 2010
When is good enough, well, good enough? I suppose that depends, one old argument says that close only works in horseshoes and hand grenades. Can it work with decision making? How about decision support systems? Is good enough the manually created spreadsheets that over 90% of organizations use for decision support? I would argue that while it’s not good enough, most business decision makers work that way.
To get at the data that most executives feel they need to make accurate decisions, many turn to the manual modification of existing reports, or the creation of their own “Pet” spreadsheet they use almost daily, or certainly many times a week.
In an update to a report cited last spring on this site, a September, 2009 Dartmouth University study suggests that the error rates in formulas on spreadsheets in their study were only .087% of all formulas they audited. HOWEVER, these were in cases where the formula produced the WRONG RESULT, and actually resulted in 87% OF THE SPREADSHEETS REVIEWED having errors in which the spreadsheet then produced the wrong result.
How good is good enough? What if you could reproduce the “Pet” spreadsheet in a true Business Intelligence solution which would ensure that the data and results in the sheet were as solid as the data in your transactional systems in the first place? How much does the wrong data or the wrong decision cost you, or your company? I would argue that “good enough” might just be good enough, if you could ensure that the data was accurate, and mitigated the possibility of error, while increasing the timeliness of the information to the decision maker. We have deployed such systems in a couple weeks’ time leveraging tools like SharePoint, Excel, and other software products that our customers already owned, and quickly delivered a system to our customer where we dramatically increased the accuracy of their information. These solutions form the basis of our iterative approach to Business Intelligence.
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New Blog post from @jdetzel Good enough? http://bit.ly/97y1yP