By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

One of the little-discussed implications of living in a digital world is that everyone becomes a digital decision maker.  In a simpler world, we a] didn’t use that much technology in our personal lives [i.e., we didn’t have that many digital decisions to make] and b] the technology we used at work was provided for us [i.e., the digital decisions that needed to be made had been made for us]. Today, we all have technology decisions to make.  By 2017 over 50% of the $3 plus trillion dollars spent each year on information technology will be driven by decision makers outside of IT. The question becomes – are the newly empowered digital decision makers ready, willing and able to make good digital decisions?

Scholars who study decision making in academia agree that three elements greatly influence the quality of any decision – the time available for making the decision, the information used in making the decision and the process via which the decision is made.

Very few organizations have a clear map of how digital decisions are made. Some execs admit to me that they are not even sure what digital decisions are being made. Mapping the Digital Decision Space is a good first step.

Not everyone is good at digital decision-making
Most people believe they are above average in terms of just about every measurable trait—sociability, humor, intelligence, driving skills and digital decision-making. Decision makers are frequently blind to their blindness.  The editors at TechRepublic contend that “Ignorance, naiveté and apathy are alive and well with the American consumer” regarding digital decision-making. Do you know who the superior digital decision makers are in your organization? The poor ones?

An Architected Decision Environment
Humans are flawed decision makers. In Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics Richard Thaler opines that humans are more like Homer Simpson than Mr. Spock. We are emotional. We are not perfect calculators and we have limited self-control.

In order to make better decisions; we need to design environments that route around our cognitive flaws. We can accept that there is bias but strive to create situations in which those biases are either irrelevant or may even be helpful.

In The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande writes about the difference between errors of ignorance—mistakes we make because we don’t have enough information—and errors of ineptitude—mistakes we make when we have enough information but don’t use it properly.

We have to make sure a new generation of outside-of-IT deciders has the information they need to make informed digital decisions. The technology industry is so vast and changing so rapidly, even professional inside the industry – even professionals solely tasked with staying on top of emerging trends and technologies are hard pressed to keep up. A frequent mistakes made by uninitiated digital deciders is assuming “What you see is all there is.”

How does your organization assemble its range of digital alternatives?