How technology empowers your organization in the decision-making process 

We live, work, and do business in a fast-paced, rapidly evolving, and increasingly digitally-driven economy. 

As an enterprise leader in this climate, your ability to swiftly react and adapt to market shifts and trends, disruptive technologies, and your customer's changing needs, expectations, and behaviors can determine whether your company is thriving or barely surviving.

That crucial agility depends on your capacity to make good decisions quickly. 

“Decision making requires both prediction and judgment,” says Harvard Business Review. 

Historically, decision-making in business has relied on uniquely human qualities: knowledge, skill, experience, qualifications, judgment, foresight, ethics, talent, strategy, philosophy, and other “x-factors”—and that will always be the case. 

Nevertheless, our high-octane digital environment demands a technological aspect in your approach to the decision-making process—and provides key tools to enhance it.

However, not everyone finds the role of technology in decision-making intuitive. (For the record, it doesn’t mean the robots will be telling you what to do.)

Here are 6 ways technology can transform and empower your organization’s decision-making process:

1. Get more out of your data. It’s the era of Big Data. In both volume and variety (social, machine, transactional, structured, unstructured…), you have more data at your disposal than ever before; it’s being generated at a previously unimaginable—and exponentially increasing—rate. But that wealth of information is only as valuable as your ability to turn it into deep insights and informed business decisions that drive growth. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) tools can rapidly process and analyze enormous quantities of diverse data, generate insights, identify trends and patterns, and make predictions that illuminate critical decisions.  
2. Free-up human power, unleash talent, and increase engagement. Good decisions require human time, energy, thought, and focus. Automation of repetitive and time-consuming manual tasks frees your team to engage in more meaningful, rewarding, and valuable work. It may seem counterintuitive, but digital transformation and/or strategic implementation of technology tools, can actually help you leverage more of the human element in your decision-making process. “Economic theory suggests that AI will substantially raise the value of human judgment, " says Harvard Business Review. “People who display good judgment will become more valuable, not less.”
3. Create a reliable central knowledge base. By eliminating data silos—which create barriers to efficiency, collaboration, productivity, and growth; inhibit a free flow of information and ideas between teams and departments; create inconsistencies; and prevent you from seeing the “big picture” in your data— system unification and data integration enable your entire team to access, interpret, and act on information from a single source of truth: up-to-date, accurate, and trusted company-wide. This provides vital knowledge and builds the confidence necessary to make strong decisions.
4. Reduce friction. Business process modernization reveals and relieves the bottlenecks, roadblocks, and inefficiencies that slow and strain the decision-making process. Replacing or rebuilding legacy systems with up-to-date, streamlined, integrated technologies enables data-led intelligence that bolsters decision-making and keeps your business agile, flexible, and scalable.
5. Bring more people to the table. From virtual meeting rooms to chat apps to centralized databases, tech tools that support remote work facilitate your entire team’s ability to be present and productive from wherever they are and access secure, reliable, real-time data. This allows you to bring all relevant stakeholders into the decision-making process, and tap into expanded resources of ideas, expertise, skill sets, perspectives, and experience. 
6. Foster collaboration. No matter where they’re located or what device they use, cloud computing, video conferencing, project management software, flexible and inclusive messaging apps, and so on, can help your entire team feel connected, valued, tapped in, and able to contribute to important decisions—improving morale, stimulating innovation, and increasing engagement.

The veteran business and technology experts at Lukasa specialize in helping companies modernize their systems and technologies to streamline processes, harness the power of data, hone decision-making, and supercharge growth.

About Lukasa - lukasa.com
Lukasa empowers small-to-medium-sized businesses by designing and implementing custom business and technology solutions that drive efficiency, productivity, and innovation, enabling them to stay ahead in today’s rapidly-changing competitive landscape.