One of the questions I posed before is: What are the NEW business problems that we can solve through IT?
One answer was - the problem of excellence in IT - doing a better job of applying IT, doing a better job of managing IT.
Today, virtually every business uses IT in almost all aspects of business operations. Perhaps one area where we are just beginning to exploiting IT more fully is in decision-making.
What are the elements of a decision? As a mnimum, the following are needed: gathering information, identifying options, laying out decision factors, testing hypotheses, making the decision itself, and finally communicating and enforcing the decision. In some cases the decision can be arrived at through a logical analysis, and other times it involves inhtuition, experience, gut feel, etc. In almost all cases, trying to get perfect knowledge from which to decide leads delays and even to analysis paralysis. I haven't really done much research on this topic but these seem like a reasonable set of requirements.
So, where does IT fit in this scenario? Clearly, IT systems are good at information gathering - with Google being the leader in the collection, indexing and presentation of information - people can use this data to help make decisions. IT could solve the problem of the internal Google for businesses (I know there are enterprise search engines, but they never seem to have all of the internal information). More to the point, we often get too much data, stale data and too little information. Perhaps IT can do a better job of providing assistance in aggregating and digesting all the data and distilling out the deciding factors.
IT could also be used for decision and solution analysis (even for planning and development of IT itself). For example, how automated are your processes for creating a hosting and networking specificationan from an application design ?
Finally, IT could help with the problems associated with ensuring that decisions are well-known (i.e., widely communicated) and are followed (approval processes and policy integration into work flows).
Perhaps I'm just behind the times, but I think this is one area where we have a lot of opportunity and a long way to go. What do you think?