Shaping Problems, Not Decisions: When Decision Makers Leverage Visual Analytics

Just as modern software development strategies have introduced agile methods and rapid prototyping to organizations. Visual analytic tools now bring the same spirit of prototyping and iteration directly into the decision-making process. Yet decision makers and analysts may not yet be as “agile” as the tools they are using and instead tend to remain in their traditional roles during analytic tasks. The emerging analytic leaders are managers who do not merely act on the findings of others but rather find and shape problems by constantly interacting with data and scrutinizing and adjusting to changes in real-time data. Our research found that: 1) managers need to develop new competencies to cognitively adapt to visual decision making; 2) managers need to become more humble and share data widely across their organizations in order to facilitate a comprehensive analytic culture; and 3) roles and responsibilities of analysts and managers need to be reconsidered.