Risks of information acquisition and processing

I have briefly described the decision making process and decisional and information retrieval behavior. Now, in addition to information retrieval behavior, I will examine and research the way in which people can make mistakes when processing and interpreting information. It is important that business intelligence software solutions keeps track (and makes visible) of which data and attributes a manager has been monitoring (Borgman, 1994). An important variance between people at the operational level and senior managers at the strategic level is that the latter demands more different and non-routine information in order to make decisions. Thus, information is more difficult to interpret and to internalize.

Information retrieval behavior

The “need” for information can be caused by four types of modes (Vandenbosch, 1997). When managers have no intention or specific purpose to find anything and are just viewing some data it is called undirected viewing or scanning which is often the case in the first sub phase of the decision making process. This is similar to undirected surfing on the internet. At the extreme other end of the continuum, we find the formal search mode which is “a deliberate effort to find a piece of information” (Aquilar, 1967). This is also referred to as focused searching.