If the last couple of years has taught us anything, it’s that the future is uncertain; unfortunately the past is no longer a good predictor of the future.
For this reason, it’s essential to be innovative and implement technology within your business that allows you to make better, informed decisions moving forward; traditional methods are no longer relevant to cope with change.
Furthermore, the right technology will enable you to continuously plan and gather real time data to strengthen forecasts moving forward; and on a regular basis.
Let’s dive a little deeper…
Decision Making
When it comes to decision making in business, we can all agree that strategic thinking and planning is essential if we are to make progress.
The decision making process should allow for problems to be solved through data analysis, allowing us to investigate the detail and the hard facts as a starting point.
Before making a decision, a specific and measurable goal should be identified, and finally, a (realistic) timeframe.
Once goals, timeframes and data have been studied and identified, you can start to form possible solutions.
Next, with these possible solutions, you can draw up possible pitfalls and rewards for each option. Why not look at what other businesses have chosen and study their outcome? There is no harm in reaching out to other businesses as most of the time, people like to share knowledge.
Finally, you should have a lot more clarity on what actions to take and put a plan in place.
How Technology Improves Decisions
Those who make business decisions in your organisation need easy access to information that justifies their decisions.
And, if this information is stored on different systems in various locations, it can make the decision making process quite difficult as they won’t see the “full picture”.
As such, businesses should invest in technology that enables them to store data in a single, central location, which decision makers can easily access, ideally with real-time information at their fingertips. If your data takes days to gather manually, the business opportunity you’re working hard to react to could easily pass by.
Moreover, technology allows users to select, analyse and manipulate data into the format they need at different stages during the decision making process.
What’s even better, is that technology helps people across teams to collaborate – removing silo working and allowing intelligent business decisions to be executed that are well-informed from all areas of the business.
Overall, the use of technology to store information also ensures its accuracy and avoids inevitable human errors through manual work.
From the above, it’s evident that in the world we live in today, technology is not a choice, but instead a business strategy that must be entwined within every part of your business.
Essentially, technology plays a major role in helping businesses to be prepared and make informed, intelligent decisions, by gathering real-time data from a single reliable source. However, technology does not work without the investment in people too – the people in your business need to believe in the technology you introduce and to be advocates for the positive change it will bring.
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