A new report on big data and big decisions was released today by PwC. The report sheds new light on the impact of big data on enterprises today, and how it is changing the process of decision making by senior executives. The PwC report, titled “Gut & Gigabytes: Capitalising on the art & science in decision making,” is based on an Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) worldwide survey of 1,135 senior executives.

It clearly defines big data as “the recent wave of electronic information produced in greater volume by a growing number of sources (i.e. not just data collected by a particular organisation in the course of normal business).”

Intuition has got a bad rap in the age of big data and the most interesting finding of this report is that 30% of executives admit that intuition is what they most relied on when they made their last big decision. An additional 28% relied on other people’s intuition (“advice or experience of others internally”). Only 30% said that “data and analysis (internal or external)” is what they relied on for their last big decision and another 9% relied on “financial indicators.”

The reliance on intuition and experience is based on… experience. 46% of executives said that relying on data analysis has been detrimental to their business in the past. They are concerned about quality, accuracy and completeness of data and find it difficult to access useful data.

Still, 64% of the executives surveyed said that big data has changed decision-making in their organizations and 25% expect it will do so over the next two years. And 49% of executives agree that data analysis is undermining the credibility of intuition or experience, compared with 21% who disagree. Says the report: “In reality, however, experience and intuition, and data and analysis, are not mutually exclusive. The challenge for business is how best to marry the two. A ‘gut instinct’ nowadays is likely to be based on increasingly large amounts of data, while even the largest data set cannot be relied upon to make an effective big decision without human involvement.”

Source: www.forbes.com