Technology Can Reduce the Cognitive Overload in the C-Suite
As analytics-based technologies mature they promise to better guide executive decisions by delivering only the most relevant information.
We stand at a turning point in the presentation and consumption of data and information. As the volume of available data doubles every three years, human beings cannot expect to keep pace. To ingest and process all that additional information, senior leaders need new tools and assistance to make sense of it all – or they will choose, of necessity, to ignore it, even at the risk of imperiling their organizations.
Today, through novel integrations of data science and augmented/artificial intelligence (A2I), we stand at the dawn of a new era, one in which leaders can expect to have the tools in hand to achieve true data-informed decision making without suffering from information overload.
For two-decades, data analysts have pushed the idea of “data-driven decision making”; the idea that perfect data can yield perfect understanding to expose clear and logical decisions. This goal has been relentlessly pursued through the perfection of data, yet the net effect of untold hours invested in “cleaning up the data” has fallen short of the promise. Leaders focus on a few numbers they trust and believe and ignore the rest. This disconnect, however, is not the result of technical flaws; rather it is a human problem. All the work that goes into improving the data fails to consider how that information is used by senior business, government, and military leaders to make decisions.
Today, we understand that “thin slicing,” as introduced by Malcom Gladwell, enables us to draw broad conclusions from comparatively small data sets. By applying that understanding, we can fuse decision science (how the brain makes decisions), with data science (how we extract meaning from data), business intelligence (the application of data science to business analytics) and A2I to provide business leaders with something more than has ever before been possible. That is an intelligent partner in the decision-making process. In short, technology created the problem of information overload, but it is now also the solution.
The difference between augmented and artificial intelligence is that artificial intelligence attempts to replace human decision-making with a machine, while augmented intelligence seeks to empower the decision-maker by providing an intelligent helping hand. While augmented intelligence can recommend courses of action, it more often seeks to increase the precision of the data presented to the human decision maker. Using data and decision science, A2I can enable decision makers to seamlessly interact with far more relevant data as they work through the decision process.
Through automation and enhanced information presentation, decision makers can more rapidly make sense of a wealth of information at their fingertips, delving deep whenever or wherever they feel the need. ADG Creative, a creative communication agency in Columbia, Md., is pioneering ways to reduce extraneous cognitive overload through fully dynamic pull and push interfaces, reducing clutter on dash boards, and using color and other graphic indicators to help users more rapidly understand the picture in front of them. They also link chat bots through cloud structures to enable natural language processing to trigger artificial intelligence and novel algorithms to refine what is delivered – and when – to senior decision makers, based on their preferences, decision and operational priorities and relevancy.
