Did You Know

Decision-making is extremely important in all kinds of business. Specifically in an environment where conditions change from one minute to the next, managers need the speed and storage capacity of computers to help them make the right choices.

• You know about the wildly successful dot-com companies. What you might not know is that a dot-com goes under every 17 hours. This is about the same rate at which brick-and-mortars fail.
• With more computing power available to businesses, we’ll need more IT specialists. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 700,000 computer engineers and analysts in 1992. By 2005 that number is expected to double.
• A neural network, which is actually artificial intelligence software, can spot possible fraud in the accounts of credit card customers and alert account executives.
• Intel has the 10,000 computers that its design engineers use networked together so that any one person can harness the processing power of all 10,000 machines.
• ASCI White, a supercomputer, costs $110 million, weights as much as 17 elephants, fills two basketball courts, takes as much cooling as 765 homes, and can do in a second what would take a calculator 10 million years.
• An old adage says that if business owners make the right decision ?? percent of the time, the business will probably be a success.

An old adage says that if business owners make the right decision 51 percent of the time, the business will probably be a success.

Of course, this old saying doesn’t take into account the type of decisions that are included in the 51 percent. Obviously, some decisions are much more important and far-reaching than others. Getting the right paper clips is not much help if you make bad decisions in selecting your target market. The point of the adage is to emphasize that you don’t have to do everything perfectly to be a success.