Do you have an e-book reader? About 50 percent of the U.S. population does.

You’d be
surprised at what digital-book publishers and retailers now know about you. The major
players in e-book publishing— Amazon, Apple, and Google—can easily track readers’
moves and actions. For instance, this passage from Catching Fire, the second book of the
Hunger Games series, was the most highlighted among
Kindle readers: “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to
deal with them” (Collins, Suzanne, Catching Fire, the Second Book from the Hunger Games,
© Suzanne Collins, New York: Scholastic Press, 2009, pp. 31–32). Subscription services
Scribd and Oyster know that sci-fi readers prefer beer over wine and that romance readers are
more likely to read in the early hours of the morning. And according to Nook data, science-
fiction, romance, and crime-fiction fans often read more books more quickly than readers of
literary fiction. The possibilities of technology as a tool for managerial decision making are
endless and fascinating! Artificial intelligence software soon will be available to
approach problems the way the human brain does—by trying to recognize patterns that
underlie a complex set of data. Like people, this software will “learn” to pick out subtle
patterns. In so doing, it will be able to perform a number of decision-making tasks.

Just as today’s computers allow you to access information quickly from sources such as
spreadsheets or search engines, most of the routine decisions that employees now make on
the job are likely to be delegated to a software program in the future. For instance, much of
the diagnostic work now done by doctors will be done by software. Patients will describe
their symptoms to a computer in a medical kiosk, possibly at their neighbourhood drugstore;
from answers the patient provides, the computer will render a decision. Similarly, many
hiring decisions will be made by software programmed to simulate the successful decision
processes used by recruiters and managers.
Welcome to the future of decision making!

POSSIBLE QUESTIONS
1. What steps of the decision-making process will technology be most useful for?
Explain.
2. How can technology be a “tool” for managerial decision making?
Big Data and Decision Making
• Amazon.com, Earth’s biggest online retailer, earns billions of dollars of revenue each
year—estimated at one-third of sales—from its “personalization technologies” such as
product recommendations and computer-generated e-mails.39
• At AutoZone, decision makers are using new software that gleans information from a
variety of databases and allows its 5,000-plus local stores to target deals and hopefully reduce
the chance that customers will walk away without making a purchase. AutoZone’s chief
information officer says, “We think this is the direction
of the future.”40

• It’s not just businesses that are exploiting big data. A team of San Francisco researchers was
able to predict the magnitude of a disease outbreak halfway around the world by analyzing
phone patterns from mobile phone usage.41

Yes, there’s a ton of information out there—100 petabytes here in the decade of
the 2010s, according to experts. (In bytes, that translates to 1 plus 17 zeroes, in case you
were wondering!)42 And businesses—and other organizations—are finally figuring out
how to use it. So what is big data? It’s the vast amount of quantifiable information
that can be analyzed by highly sophisticated data processing. One IT expert described
big data with “3V’s: high volume, high velocity, and/or high variety information
assets.”43

What does big data have to do with decision making? A lot, as you can imagine. With this
type of data at hand, decision makers have very powerful tools to help them make decisions.
However, experts caution that collecting and analyzing data for data’s sake is wasted effort.
Goals are needed when collecting and using this type of
information. As one individual said, “Big data is a descendant of Taylor’s ’scientific
management’ of more than a century ago.”44 While Taylor used a stopwatch to time
and monitor a worker’s every movement, big data is using math modeling, predictive
algorithms, and artificial intelligence software to measure and monitor people and
machines like never before. But managers need to really examine and evaluate how
big data might contribute to their decision making before jumping in with both feet.
Why? Because big data, no matter how comprehensive or well analyzed, needs to be
tempered by good judgment.