Decision analytics mobilized with digital coaching

• Published date: 01 January 2018
• Date: 01 January 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/isaf.1421
• Author: Christer Carlsson

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Decision analytics mobilized with digital coaching

Christer Carlsson

Institute for Advanced Management Systems

Research, Turku, Finland

Correspondence

Christer Carlsson, Institute for Advanced

Management Systems Research, Turku,

Finland.

Email: christer.carlsson@abo.fi

Summary

The context to be addressed is the digitalization of industry and industrial processes.

Digitalization brings enhanced customer relationships and value‐chain integration, which are

effective instruments to meet increasing competition and slimmer margins for productivity and

profitability. Digitalization also brings more pronounced requirements for effective planning,

problem solving and decision making in an increasingly complex and fast‐changing environment.

Decision analytics will meet the challenges from the growing global competition that major indus-

trial corporations face and will help solve the problems of big data/fast data that digitalization is

generating as a by‐product. A mantra is appearing in business magazines –that powerful, intelli-

gent systems will be effective tools for the digitalization of industrial processes –but much less

attention appears to be paid to the fact that users need advanced knowledge and skills to benefit

from the intelligent systems. First, an effective transfer of knowledge from developers, experts

and researchers to users (including management) will be needed; second, the daily use and

operations of the systems need to be supported, as automated, intelligent industrial systems

are complex to operate. We look at this transfer as knowledge mobilization and will work out

how the mobilization can be supported with coaching; this coaching needs to be digital, as human

coaches are both scarce and too expensive to employ in large numbers.

KEYWORDS

decision analytics,digital coaching, digitalization,soft computing

1|INTRODUCTION

Digitalization is changing both the substance and the context for

business and industry. This change is described as disruptive (Harvard

Business Review, 2017)—even as ‘the fourth industrial revolution’

(Degryse, 2016; World Economic Forum, 2016)—and in work with

industrial partners (Carlsson, Heikkilä, & Mezei, 2016) we have found

a growing awareness of the challenges that digitalization is bringing

to industry.

There is mention of three drivers that define digitalization

(Degryse, 2016; Harvard Business Review, 2017). The first driver is

the development of high‐speed networks, the Internet and (as a

derivative) Internet‐of‐Things, which have formed and are forming

completely new requirements on industrial operations. The second

driver is a consequence of the first; the new technology generates

large datasets —Big Data—that both create challenges for handling

them and opportunities to exploit very large masses of commercial,

personal and geographic data. The third driver is the mobile technology

that gives consumers, workers and service developers and providers

access to mobile Internet everywhere and at all times. Digitalization

also builds on the dramatic changes in affordable analytic and

processing power that users of modern information and communica-

tion technology have today compared with the 1970s’generation of

users: the data processing performance of a modern smartphone at

about €500–600 is comparable to that of a modern mainframe

computer at several million USD in the 1970s.

Digitalization of the economy—or the digital economy—represents

a transition from a society in which energy was the engine of progress,

innovation and productivity to one where data, information and

knowledge, with the technologies that enable the use of them, will be

the engines of progress (Degryse, 2016; World Economic Forum, 2016).

There are some new factors that digital technology has introduced

that will have a profound impact for industrial corporations and how

they operate (Harvard Business Review, 2017; World Economic

Forum, 2016). Social and interactive networking is moving from the

consumer to the corporate sector and is enabling effective and

productive exchange of knowledge and information, and also outside

formal communication and reporting channels. As interactive

networking becomes part of corporate communication it also becomes

flexible and personalized as content is customized and access to

DOI: 10.1002/isaf.1421

Intell Sys Acc Fin Mgmt. 2018;25:3–17. Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/isaf 3