I ran across a short piece I posted in May 2017 entitled, “The Connection Between Decision Making, Critical Thinking, and Quality Data,” and the concept still remains not only relevant but absolutely essential, especially for supply market intelligence/research (SMI) efforts. SMI is in a constant state of change as continuous technological advances are being made in the delivery of products and services. Many startups offering supply chain and procurement-related solutions are utilizing exciting new ways of integrating quality supplier and market risk data into innovative offerings. Now, decisions are being made about whether to obtain market and risk data from standalone resources or those integrated into full or partial end-to-end procuretech offerings and/or made available via associated marketplaces. Add to this the movement towards providers offering unified/single views of data and the marked uptick in concern about AI generated content that misleads and/or misinforms and complexity mounts. As challenges related to these complexities increase, the ability to allow for critical thinking based on high quality data must still always be at the forefront of research efforts.
Here is the text of the original post:
Procurement and business professionals are continuously making critical decisions that affect their stakeholders and the organization as a whole. These decisions can be major and directly impact strategy, operations, and risk concerns. It seems obvious that decisions should be made based on quality information. To emphasize just how important, consider the following reminder:
- Optimal decision making is achieved through critical thinking
- Critical thinking is enabled by the use of quality data/information
- Quality data is as good as the quality of the resources referenced
- The more quality resources consulted, the greater the ability to connect data threads to enable optimal decision making
This cycle of decision making, critical thinking and the use of quality resources is even more relevant in the age of quick access to information and the unfortunate growing phenomenon of fake news. Regardless if decision making is being done by a human or machine, the use of quality data will always be at the core.
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay, Graphic by Cottrill Research
