If poor decisions are the problem, what's the answer?

Interesting article in this month's Intelligent Enterprise - Voice of Our Readers: The 2006 Strategic Management Survey. Some interesting insights on the BI market and other things but one comment leaped out at me

A significant portion of the workers in my business frequently make poor decisions because they can't get enough useful information.

This statement was strongly agreed with across the board - regardless of company size. I suspect that many would use this as justification for more and better investments in business intelligence software. Now me, I would look at the phrase "significant portion" and think to myself "I wonder if the people who can't get good information are people poor at using Excel who lack analysis skills" and "I wonder if the people who make bad decisions are in jobs with low skill requirements and high turnover".

If, as I suspect is often the case, these two things were both true I might think that what I have here is a sign that I need to adopt an Enterprise Decision Management approach and deliver insight not to these workers directly but to the systems that support or even replace them. BI tools simply won't solve some of these problems - you need to use the same basic approach of analyzing data to improve decision-making but apply it to a computer system, not a person. This means business rules, it means predictive analytics, it means EDM.