So your company adopted the latest data analytics and visualization tools. The ones that can take a truckload of data from your company and transform it into a cool-looking report jam-packed with insights that resemble the ones published by the well-known, well-respected, super legit resources like McKinsey and Deloitte. The only problem: no one on your team, not even you, really knows what any of it means, let alone how to leverage these insights to drive business growth.
This is what happens when you let Business Intelligence take over and let yourself (and your brain) off the hook.
What is Business Intelligence (BI)?
If your company compiles, visualizes, and analyzes its data to make informed decisions, it uses Business Intelligence. And why wouldn’t it? The modern world of business runs on data. Who’s been the talk of the town for the past three years? Artificial Intelligence. And what makes Artificial Intelligence intelligent? Data. It uses heaps and heaps of data to make predictions and analyze possible outcomes. That’s what businesses do when they want to be intelligent.
[In search of the best data visualization tools? Check out this edition of The PTP Report.]
But is intelligence something companies have bestowed upon them by data and the tools that help make sense of it? Or is it something businesses need to make this stuff work?
What Makes Intelligence?
In 2023, Harvard University published a paper called “What Makes Us Smart?” The authors consult past research with a critical eye, questioning individualistic Western theories like the “Great Brain” theory of innovation, which emphasizes a single genius inventor rather than a culmination of collective thinking.
This is to say that breakthrough innovations and theories do not live in a vacuum. Perhaps one or two people execute the final product, but their ideas and methods are a culmination of a long history of other minds coming together to create new things and concepts.
To put it simply, advanced tools like AI and data analytics are not Great Brains, and when we treat them as such, they may make us dumber.
[Thinking of pursuing a career Data Science? Learn what makes this a great idea in