Automation, a curse or a blessing?

It is always said about decision-making that you need the right information for it. Well-aggregated, correct, complete, up-to-date, accurate and verifiable to boot. Junior executives even think they need a great deal of information: if I know everything, I will be able to make the right decision.

Suppliers of software packages think that top executives are only able to think in three-dimensional, multicolour pie charts or other fancy diagrams, made accessible via a hierarchy of simplistic icons.

The IT industry has plunged greedily into this supposed need for information by developing MIS, DSS and even EIS, nowadays. EIS is an accessibility system for raw data of various types, with many navigation possibilities, while the origin of the data is transparent to the user. EIS sees to the aggregation of data on different levels.

It turns out, however, that top executives need only little information. They base their decisions on intuitive signals and use the information to support their decisions afterwards. The latter seems to be necessary to persuade subordinates of the plausibility of the decisions in question. The point is that we are not used to follow leaders anymore; we only start moving if we understand the plausibility ourselves.

Decision-making, however, is not exclusively an executive task. All of us make many decisions every day. Decisions based on information, preferably of high quality. These form the crux of the matter: ‘information’ and ‘quality’. Information, or so we are taught, is a body of data that improves the knowledge. But what is knowledge? And what is improvement? Improvement of our functioning as a human being or improvement of the ego? In practice it turns out to be very difficult to find the right measure for our information need.

The value information has for decision-making lies in the reduction of insecurity, which is the next obstacle. We, people, have a great intrinsic insecurity, because we have forgotten who we really are. Identified with everyday routine, we hardly realise this. Because of this great insecurity, it is difficult to determine what the right information is for the problem at hand, both for an individual and for those who are trying to help. As a consequence, all kinds of data are acquired or offered. It is silently assumed that among all those data surely the information that is necessary must be present somewhere. This bears close resemblance to the proverbial needle in a haystack, and such a mass of data hardly has any decisive value. At best, it serves an activity of the ego that collects data for possible future events, on the pretext of. ‘It doesn’t hurt to know’. Because of the mass of data and the obscurity of it, we think that decision-making itself should also be automated. Such automation would imply that the decision-making process always takes place according to a fixed pattern, thus leading to a depersonalisation of our society.

The quality of decision-making is therefore highly influenced by the quality of the automated information. Moreover, the quality of decision-making ought not to be determined solely by financial and economical considerations, or by technical considerations. It should rather be expressed in terms of progress of human development. If only financial and economical or technical factors play a role, our society will sink to a merely mechanical level.

Anyway, an executive who bases his decisions only on management information, might as well be replaced by an intelligent computer.