Data overload: The rise of decision distress

Decision-making has become more challenging due to the exponential growth of available data, and people are struggling to make informed choices that can have a significant impact on their lives and businesses.

While business leaders in Asia-Pacific and Japan predominantly believe that data is critical to the success of their organisation, 87% of them, due to a lack of tools, have experienced decision distress in the past year.

According to Oracle’s new Decision Dilemma study, conducted in collaboration with Data Scientist and Author Seth-Stephens Davidowitz, the lack of trust in large volumes of data has prevented 73% of business leaders in Asia-Pacific and Japan from making any decisions. More critically, 92% of business leaders believe that the growing number of data sources has limited the success of their organisation.

Stephens-Davidowitz said, “It has been proven repeatedly that our instincts can lead us astray and the best decision-making is done with a proper understanding of the relevant data. Finding a way to get a handle on the stream of data at their fingertips, to help organisations distinguish between the signal and the noise, is a crucial first step.”

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To prevent business leaders from abandoning data, it must be relevant to their decisions, the report highlighted. 75% of business leaders believe that people often make decisions and then look for data to justify them, while 74% of employees believe organisations often prioritise the opinion of the highest-paid person over data.

Encouraging business leaders to rethink their approach to decision making, Chris Chelliah, Senior Vice President, Technology and Customer Strategy, Oracle Japan and Asia Pacific, said, “As businesses expand to serve customers in new ways, the number of data inputs required to get the full picture expands too. Business leaders that make critical decisions ignore that data at their own risk.”