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Business leaders nationwide are feeling overwhelmed and lacking decision-making confidence due to the constant influx of data, causing some to abandon important questions altogether.
These were the findings of a new study conducted by Oracle, which involved more than 14,000 participants across the world, including 1,000 Australian business leaders.
The Decision Dilemma study found that 95 per cent of Australian business leaders suffer from “decision distress,” where they feel regret, guilt, or doubt about a decision they made in the past year.
Concerningly, nearly all respondents (99 per cent) surveyed also believe that the increasing number of data sources has limited the success of their organisations.
“Australia understands that data is instrumental to making accurate and reliable decisions. However, today, business leaders and employees are faced with an unprecedented volume of data, leaving many feeling overwhelmed and stripping them of confidence in decision making,” said Stephen Bovis, regional managing director at Oracle ANZ.
Notably, almost all respondents (99 per cent) want help from data. In an ideal scenario, they want data to help them make better decisions (34 percent), reduce risk (35 percent), make faster decisions (34 per cent), make more money (38 percent), and plan for the unexpected (32 percent).
While 95 per cent of respondents recognise the significance of data in making accurate and reliable decisions and understand that any business calls shouldn’t be made “based on gut feeling alone”, a staggering 93 per cent also believe the volume of data has made decision making more complex in both their personal and professional lives — the percentage highest in the world.
With this, the report warned that the country is now facing a “decision-making crisis”, one where leaders are unsure whether to rely on their intuition or the data in front of them.
As a result, many Australians are simply avoiding making decisions altogether, with the figures higher for business leaders (89 per cent) than employees (75 per cent).
Findings also showed strategic decision making has become slower (37 per cent) and more opportunities for error emerged (32 per cent) from managing different data sources with their required additional resources.
Business leaders also acknowledged that the current approach to data and analytics is not addressing these challenges.
Almost 90 per cent of surveyed business leaders said dashboards and charts do not always relate directly to decisions that they make, while 90 per cent said most data available is only helpful for IT professionals or data scientists.
In fact, 90 per cent of business leaders said they often make decisions before looking for data to justify their calls.
On the upside, business leaders admit changes have to be made and believe access to accurate data and insights can enable better decision making across various business functions.
They believe the right data and insights can help them make better HR (99 per cent), finance (99 per cent), supply chain (99 per cent), and customer experience (98 percent) decisions.
Mr Bovis said that while Australian business leaders clearly understand the impact the right data can have for their businesses, they do require help in making the data “work for them”.
“The hesitancy, distrust, and lack of understanding of data shown by this study indicates that many people and organisations need to rethink their approach to data and decision making. What people really need is to be able to connect data to insight to decision to action,” he stated.
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