Several weeks ago, I wrote a post about how the pace at which the world is accumulating information exceeds our ability to critically evaluate it. For companies that make thousands or millions of marketing decisions every day in the form of price offerings, advertising placements and so on, this translates into making decisions that perpetually involve a greater amount of uncertainty relative to the amount of information we have. The root cause of this problem is a technological one: we do not have the computing power to slice and dice massive datasets in order to glean insight in time to support decisions. An even deeper explanation is that the gap between the rate of information accumulation in businesses and the pace of information transfer improvements will continue to widen at an increasing rate. This poses serious challenges to the capabilities offered by Business Intelligence, not to mention our ability to determine optimal prices. Continue reading →