From Search Engine to Decision Engine
When Bing came out last year, Microsoft presented it as a decision engine. This caused quite a stir in the decision management community. Have they gone mad?
For decision management experts, the claim is absurd. However, once I became open-minded to the idea, I’ve gained several fascinating insights. Around the same time as their announcement, I started boosting and optimizing my social media presence. During the process, I came across some very interesting blogs and presentations like “SEO is the New Social Media Optimization” with Hubspot CEO Brian Solis. I liked and retweeted one of his quotes:
“Social Media affects every step of the decision making process.”
— Brian Solis
We gather information to inform our decisions. We ask friends and family, we do “research” online, and we mine our past experiences. Social Media is one of our resources for information. So from that perspective, a search engine is a decision engine. Well, from a technical standpoint, it’s a decision support tool. Decision engines executes automated decisions in runtime.
Different Kinds of Decisions
While those of us in the decision management community focus on automated decisions, which primarily occur in high volume and frequency, many are not automated. What home should I buy? Where should we go on vacation? What movie should I watch tonight? When it comes to these types of decisions, decision makers can benefit from a decision support tool like Bing.
In an IDC breakfast I attended earlier this year, Steve Hendrick put together a great chart on decisions. Tactical ones occur in high volume with low individual impact while strategic ones occur in low volume with high individual impact. I have also seen decisions divided into operational, tactical, and strategic. BRMS and now decision management technologies work with tactical decisions according to Hendrick’s definition (and operational decisions in the latter definition). Decision management has to tackle strategic decisions and where tools like Bing can help.
Social Media is the Magic Ingredient
I think what the people at Microsoft understood is that social media is changing the potential of search. With social media there’s more data on the collective. For example, websites like Hunch use tribal knowledge to recommend products based on a user’s interest. This is just the tip of the iceberg on what’s possible. Solis mentioned in his webinar how social searches outperform traditional searches through search engines like Google for news. One of the reasons is that people are more likely to trust news from people they know.
Businesses are finding ways to incorporate social media into decision-making as well. If I recall correctly, SAS created a fraud management applications that enables social search. This allows fraud case workers to use information from an individual’s social networks to determine whether or not they’re likely committing fraud. I’m excited to see how social media use cases evolve over time. Perhaps in the future, social media data will be commonly used in decision management solutions.
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