Bell’s thesis is that the human mind (and body), with its 1015 cells and up to 100,000 interconnections between each cell, has developed efficient and adaptive ways of dealing with problems and situations that might affect survival. These include emotion, the separation of long- and short-term memory, the ability to forget, an autonomic nervous system and consciousness. He suggests that it may be worthwhile for the modern corporation to examine some of these techniques.

 Certainly, BI is not working effectively for many businesses. During his recent travels, Bell said he had visited a number of banks, all of which had invested between $10 million and $50 million on large data warehouses. “All of them had expected that wisdom would spring fully formed out of the databases like Athena, but it hadn’t happened.”

“There must be a place we can see where the whole thing about processing and using information is done well,” says Bell. That place may be the human brain.

Drawing on the ideas of Antonio Damasio, the neuroscientist and author of Descartes’ Error: Emotion, reason and the human brain, Bell examined the way that humans use experiences to develop adaptive responses.

One example is the autonomic nervous system, which enables humans to push a lot of routine measurement and adaptive responses below the level of consciousness.  For example, humans control their breathing, blood pressure and blood sugar levels without thinking about them. Bell also points to the role of emotion, which neuroscientists view as a powerful way of summarising the state of an organism. Emotion is also tied closely to memory – partly to ensure that relevant information is remembered and responses developed, and that unimportant information is forgotten.

While the lessons from this may be a little harder to learn, there might be good reasons for which information is discarded, which is kept, and where and how it is used. “Humans forget things. Those of you into content management, take note. It’s important to forget things,” said Bell.

Bell’s argument is not that BI is being used wrongly, but that the focus should be on building up the ability to formulate effective responses. “Intelligence to a neuroscientist is different from intelligence to a business. [For the neuroscientist,] intelligence is a way of taking all that knowledge and formulating adaptive responses. BI should not be about end-of-month reporting or putting everything into one great data warehouse. The intelligence [in BI] needs to move from a consciousness of what’s happening to actually formulating responses. That why you are hearing so much about predictive BI,” said Bell.

Bell notes that consciousness is largely outwardly focused, while most of what goes on internally has been automated. But, he says, “I’ve spoken to very few organisations who think that getting information from outside is more important than from inside.”  That, believes Bell, is likely to change.

He concludes: “Think about the brain. We’re designed to be conscious animals. Take it all in, store it, keep a memory of your last response and whether it was successful. The really powerful organisations will be those that start to act like the body corporate.”