Data driven decisions in enterprises – implications for business education and cases

List of Contributors

Foreword

It is a fact that it has been a long time since information and communication technologies crossed the Rubicon River. But an unending effort is still being made to make improvements. There are aphorisms about dice such as Einstein’s famous God does not play dice. The aim is to remove randomness, albeit partially, to try to see the future in the twilight instead of trying to see in the dark. Since Alan Turing’s concept of thinking machines, new research and new concepts have constantly been on the agenda for decades to achieve this goal.

Since ancient times, every organization has had to collect and process information. Sun Tzu, one of the famous generals of China and the author of The Art of War, which is considered the oldest military treatise in the world written on strategy, emphasized the importance of knowing yourself and your opponent about 2,500 years ago:

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

In his Il Principe (The Prince), Machiavelli drew attention to the need for large-scale intelligence activities for the establishment and maintenance of power in similar ways in army and state administration.

The foundations of competitive intelligence in the territory of today’s Germany are based on the acquisition of intelligence for its own sales force by the Fürst Fugger Bank in the 15th century. In these reports, called Fugger News, intelligence obtained about the known world through agents was sent to those who did business with the bank and to some princes in the region. Another example of intelligence in these lands is the request to regularly report political, economic, and commercial information to central units in the orders sent to top-level officers on foreign duty in the 15th century. More modern German intelligence activities can be seen in the 18th century. In Europe, the Germans managed to seize the international patents and production rights to most formulas and processes, especially with their intelligence activities in the chemical sector, competing against French and British companies.

With a few exceptions, this approach still holds today. In our age, we have more data and more processing power. In our world, where information and communication technologies are reshaping and continuing to shape in every field, it is clear that enterprises that can follow the flow of information, grind the ←11 | 12→information they collect in information mills, and provide intelligence by using their internal and external information, can adapt to changing conditions in a timely and effective manner in proportion to its power. Every living organism, whether human, animal or plant, or enterprise, has the chance to survive if it has information about its internal and external environment and can use this information correctly to adapt in the best possible way. The only way to realize all this is to gain internal and external intelligence in the most superior way, convert the obtained data into knowledge in the most effective way, and use them in the decision-making process. As Internet access and capacity increase, a business’s environment has become the whole world today. At this point, the aim is to automate the realization of this whole process to the greatest possible extent. In this context, the important developments we have seen in the last 20 years have been focusing on business intelligence, big data, deep learning, reinforcement learning, data intelligence, decision intelligence, automated decision-making, and other concepts and the development of application tools.

Data-Driven Business at Miele: An Implementation Case in the Manufacturing Industry