Chat with us, powered by LiveChat

Visit our new site! Click seechange.com.au

Proactive decision making (and how to avoid running out of fuel)

May 18, 2011 | By | Add a Comment

This weekend, I ran out of fuel on my way home from golf. I’d played a good, quick round, won the comp and was on my way home around 10.30am feeling pretty good. Then, unexpectedly, my car ran out of petrol. This got me to thinking about the difference between reactive and proactive decision-making …

Now typically, when fuel is getting low, I get a ‘warning’ light on the car dashboard. This is like your classic BI dashboard/scorecard – when something happens, the status may change from green to yellow or red. From this, I can then estimate that I need to refuel within some unknown but bounded number of kilometers, which I estimate based on past history to be somewhere  between 25-40km (I do tend to ‘cut it a bit fine’ sometimes!).  Similarly, in a business context, we watch for status indicators changing based on past history, then react based on experience, knowledge and ‘gut feel’, one of reasons why the traditional BI paradigm is sometimes referred to as being a “rear-view mirror”.  This is reactive decision-making.

However, this weekend, my fuel gauge was playing up, and didn’t indicate that I was low on fuel (it was still showing the tank as ¼ full). So, a few kilometers from leaving the golf course, I ground to a halt. If this was, by way of analogy, my ‘cash flow’ or similar financial indicator, I might be looking at a foreclosure or bankruptcy instead of the minor embarrassment of having to call the NRMA (Australian equivalent of AAA in the US or the AA in the UK) to be ‘rescued’.

At this stage, I still trusted my previously reliable indicator, the fuel gauge, so I had no idea of what could be causing the problem. Was it the alternator? Or worse? My NRMA patrolman (“management consultant”), in true Aussie larrikin fashion, bet me $20 that the problem was lack of fuel ie that my fuel gauge (financial ‘metric’) was misleading me. I took the bet. He won.

Ironically, my other vehicle has, instead of a fuel gauge, an onboard ‘algorithm’ which predicts, real-time, how many kilometers I can drive until the tank is empty. So if I’m burning rubber, it might drop to 8km to empty, if I’m driving on cruise control it might go up to 45km. This is proactive decision-making. I have a forward-looking view: if I do this, then this is the result. If it’s 40km to the nearest service station, I can adjust my driving accordingly in order to make it based on the fuel I have remaining. This is why moving beyond the traditional BI paradigm of reactive decision-making enables me to make better, more informed decisions. And avoid running out of fuel. Literally, or figuratively.

Filed in: Analytics

Patrick Spedding

About the Author (Author Profile)

Patrick Spedding is Senior Director of BI R&D for Rocket Software, and IBM Champion for IBM Collaboration Solutions. He is also a Non-Executive Director on the Board of Eastside Radio in Sydney, Australia. Prior roles include Director of Product Management for IBM Cognos, Director of Field Marketing for Cognos, Founder of Tableau partner See-Change Solutions, and SAS Solution Manager for BI and Strategy Management. Patrick's qualifications include an MBA degree in Marketing (AIU), Diploma in Management (University of Michigan), BSc (Hons) in Mathematics (Loughborough University, UK), Fellow of the Australian Institute of Management (FAIM), and member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD). Find Patrick on Google+

Leave a Reply

Trackback URL | RSS Feed for This Entry