Does your software provide the information that you need to run your business?

I read a study a few months ago that identified two key issues about managers in a business:

• 15% or more of a manager's time is spent looking for information.
• 42% make decisions based on bad information, once per week.

Since the role of a manager is to make decisions, and decisions are made based on the information that is available, this means that managers are extremely unproductive (wasting 40% of their time) and ineffective if they make decisions on bad information.

What's the reason for this?

Most of our information today comes from computer systems. They are capable of producing data at a much higher rate than any manager can absorb. What is the problem?

Most software that is installed in a business is installed to handle normal transaction workload, because this is the obvious area. The more transactions that can be handled by the fewest staff creates a more productive environment.

However, hidden in all of these transactions is the data about your business. Unless you can extract this data, it isn't being used to manage your business.

In many assignments that I have taken on, I look for data about the business. By analysing that data, I can find out a lot about the business. It may take a lot of analysis and structuring before I can understand the value. In most cases, what I come up with is not known by the business owners and managers. They have assumptions about what is happenning that conflicts with the data. They don't know, because they don't get this information normally.

Computer systems are a great source of data, but it is useless unless the data can be turned into something useful that can be used to make decisions.