This post is about Evidence-Based Management published under article “Intelligence required Moving from data to insight” by Bernard Marr – CMA Management magazine, June/July 2009 .

Through Evidence-Based management, organizations explicitly use evidence (the best and most appropriate information) to guide the decision-making process to extract maximum value and competitive advantage from their data and information. According to Stanford University Professor Robert Sutton EBM is simple idea: It just means finding the best evidence that you can, facing those facts, and acting on those facts – rather than doing what everyone else does, what you have always done, or what you thought was true. We like this statement.

Five steps towards evidence-based management (EBM)

Step 1: Defining objective and information needs.
Step2: Based on step 1 collecting data.
Step 3: Analyzing data – focus on turning data into relevant insights.
Step 4: Presenting information – focusing on communicating the information and insights to business decision makers – extracted in step 3.
Step 5: Making evidence based decision concerned with Turing information into knowledge and decisions.

Role of information technology in EBM

IT and Business intelligence (BI) plays an important role in Evidence-Based management. Right steps should be taken and most important is common sense and something we do intuitively, instead of believing that state-of-the art Business Intelligence infrastructure will resolve all the problems.

Our point of view: we strongly agree with the evidence-based management techniques presented above, especially Professor Robert Sutton’s statement that finding the best evidence, facing those facts, and acting on those facts.