Augmented Intelligence

The current state of affairs in Business Intelligence is a rather top-down driven and manual process. 

Let's say, a business user is interested in how a business process is performing. If they are lucky, a performance dashboard for monitoring key performance indicators (KPI), exists. If not, it will have to be developed. A request-response situation, through the whole IT/developer/analyst organizational stack. In more sophisticated business, possibly with sophisticated tools, the business user can configure new KPIs on the fly, assuming they have the proper understanding of KPI logic and proper tool usage.

Three issues stand out from this approach:

1. Turn-around time (lack of agility, due to reliance on human-driven process)
2. Business people's focus gets side-tracked by required tool & database knowledge
3. Potential for error (as always in overloaded human responsibilities)

So what can we do? How about automating the mundane tasks and leaving humans with work they are good at? Welcome to "Augmented Intelligence". Instead of going form one extreme (manual process) to the other extreme (Artificial Intelligence), how about a balance to leave the tedious work to computers, and the more fluid, ambiguous information that requires human judgment to people. But how to make sure that people don't over-ride human judgment, and vice versa, humans not second-guessing proven algorithmic correlations of real data?

That's where the feedback loops and iterative approach comes in. Delegate & monitor, trust-but-verify, do & review. And track history of all decisions made. If business changes are applied, keep tracking the old reality and compare it to the new (something like A/B testing in marketing). You can only know if something works when comparing to the alternative(s).

Make things easy for people, use common interfaces: Web, Email, Wikis, News/Event formats.

Simulate a work-flow they are used to from their personal life: Send messages. Read how-to articles. Get News. Write letters to the editor. Publish their ideas.

Get buy-in from your organization by cultural popularity, make it another social engagement opportunity. Accountability & motivation will evolve naturally as people enjoy these more flexible and bottom-up driven opportunities to make an impact.

Don't have the computers try to do the complicated things humans can easily do, and don't have people do dull tasks that are much better performed by computers.

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