Now comes the hard part in business intelligence: figuring out how the humans can make better use of all our data and tools for decision making, writes Wayne Eckerson, director of TDWI Research. Let’s bring in the shrinks.

When Wayne points to a trend, it’s news even if others might have already foreseen it. He’s one of the industry’s most thoughtful observers, and one of the most deliberate.

In Tuesday morning’s blog post, he suggests improving BI by enlisting those who study how people make decisions.

To take BI to the next level, we need better insights into human behavior and perception. In other words, it’s time to recruit psychologists onto our BI teams.

He gave an example of one place that could have benefited from visits to the shrink’s couch.

A recent article in the Boston Globe called “Think Different, CIA” provides some instructive lessons for companies using BI tools to make decisions. The article describes a phenomenon that psychologists call “premature cognitive closure” to explain how humans in general, and intelligence analysts in particular, can get trapped by false assumptions, which can lead to massive intelligence failures. It turns out that humans over the course of eons have become great at filtering lots of data quickly to make sense of a situation. Unfortunately, those filters often blind us to additional evidence — or its absence — that would disprove our initial judgment or “theory.” In other words, humans rush to judgment and are blinded by biases. Of course, we all know this, but rarely do organizations implement policies and procedures to safeguard against such behaviors and prevent people from making poor decisions.

See his full post here.

Be sure to see the comments, too. He writes in reply to questions, “Like data governance, we need some principles for approaching and managing decisions. Maybe we should start a decision governance institute!?”

I can’t help notice: an institute.

See “CIA’s insights on the psychology of analysis” on Datadoodle.

With all the talk about technology, let’s pause to refresh with three basics — culture, conversation, and collaboration. These basics will take center stage in BI’s future, and they’ll help decide which tools dominate.

Lyzasoft CEO Scott Davis and I have been reading the same book, The Culture of Cities by Lewis Mumford. The great thing about Mumford, said Scott, is his mastery of so many subjects, which lets him see relationships and meaning among facts that might otherwise seem irrelevant to each other.

The intelligence that soaks up through every paragraph makes the book a thoroughly enjoyable and insightful chew.

“Think of the most intelligent people you know,” he said. “Are they intelligent because they have an encyclopedic knowledge of facts? Or is it their ability to see relationships? I would say it’s door number two, right?”

Trouble is, we can’t all be Stephen Hawking or Lewis Mumford. That calls for linking of minds. That is, collaboration and conversation. We have to find a way for normal people to find a way to see relationships and offer them.

Train people?, I suggested. Maybe, he replied, but what would that say about the state of BI? It’s natural to have conversations and collaborate. Relevant knowledge and observations bubble up as people focus on something and make associations, gradually raising the group’s insight.

But today, BI platforms make contributing difficult. “BI designers decide what reports are going to be out there, and that’s the well you can drink from.” Instead, people should be as free as in any conversation to make new syntheses, to comment, to recommend — “all the things you’d expect at a dinner party. BI doesn’t feel like a dinner party, does it?”

“I suspect,” he said, “that even though we don’t see it within formal tools, it really is happening, such as through email, spreadmarts, the water cooler and such.”

First comes culture. “If you don’t have that culture that draws people into that practice [of collaboration],” said Scott, “you can have all the tools in the world and it isn’t going to help.”

Next come tools. “There are technological things we can do to make contributing more routine.” He mentioned two mashup tools he likes: JackBe and NetVibes.

The entrenched players are going to change, he predicts. Either Cognos and BO and the others will become a lot more like JackBe and NetVibes, or else companies like JackBe and NetVibes will become the dominant players.

He said, “Ultimately, open and relational are going to win.”