Greater Choice Equals Less Efficiency?

This evening, I attended the monthly Microsoft Business Intelligence Community event held at their office in the Dallas-area suburb of Irving. Drew Minkin, a former Microsoft employee-turned-consultant, gave a wonderful talk on the benefits and pitfalls of BI solutions from the perspective of pricing analysis. His employer, Zilliant Corporation, specializes in helping large organizations shift their pricing strategy from an off-the-cuff intuitive guess to knowledge-driven precision derived from both internal and industry-wide data sources.

The content of his talk began whirling around my mind during the drive home afterward. I found myself forming why questions: Why is there such inefficiency in pricing? Why don’t more decision-makers actively search for solutions, such as Zilliant offers, that are driven by data instead of gut feeling? I then I hit upon something, seemingly trivial, that completely astonished me: Human choices drive inefficiency. I recognize forces beyond human control, and personally believe in God as the absolute authority, but the indirect relationship between human action and efficiency makes sense. Remember Henry Ford? He’s quoted as saying, “You can have any color you want, as long as it’s black.”

Ford recognized that limiting superfluous options, such as color, and focusing on essential factors, such as usability and production cost, would provide a competitive advantage against the classier auto manufacturers of his day who prided themselves on customization, low volume, and high prices.

The implications for business decision makers, and thus the case for better BI solutions, is an entire series of posts in itself. By the end of my trip home, my thoughts focused in on the effect of this relationship between choice and efficiency upon our beloved social web.

As a card-carrying member of the social graph, a single node among millions, I see more clearly now than ever the need to strip away superfluous choices. Let’s focus in on what I’m terming structured choice. A quick Googling of the term found some legal and health care-related references to the term, so I don’t plan on applying for a trademark anytime soon, but my desire is this: Let’s conceptualize what it truly means to co-create context with each other. Perhaps we can use several well-defined metrics to strike a healthy balance between choice (we don’t want to starve or gorge ourselves) and efficiency (we all have things to do). From the perspective of social innovation, how do we create a network of funnels, pipes, drains, and spigots to invert the choice/efficiency relationship before things get out of hand?

There’s something significant here, and I hardly claim originality, but there must be a way to reconcile the ever-increasing number of choices presented to us within our increasingly inter-connected social graph with the critical need to accomplish something of higher value than tossing another sheep. How can we create a better context, or environment, for structuring the choices around us? Examples of metrics that will drive the definition of context already exist, such as activity, personality, interests, friends, location, goals, etc. I hope this fires your imagination as much as it does mine. Let’s start by defining these metrics in clearer terms, and in so doing define what context means in terms of the social web. I’m sure much of the answer we seek is already out there, waiting for us to discover it. Let’s dig.