What fashionable information means to the retail giant, Zara.  "Information is king' and of 'market-data'?  Huh, Au contaire, think again!

If there's one thing technology has made readily available and easily accessible to everyone, it would have to be information.  It has even become so large that we came up with something to organize all these data we now simply refer to as I.T. - by which a teams look up to as the quickest fix (and for the hard-coded, panacea) for productivity concerns and at most, success in every endeavor. 

Yet, all the information hasn't necessarily translated to the kind of results that business often wished for.  It is fair to say that too much information made it more difficult to pick what is relevant for effective plan execution.  On a basic level, individuals and companies dealt with what can be classified as 'clutter' - the kind of information that leads to time-wasting, causes paralysis and negatively affects agility. 

Psychologically, the tendency to accumulate information might have something to do with choices which Herbert Simon has explored in the 1950's which he made distinctions between what he termed maximizers and satisficers .

A maximizer is like a perfectionist, someone who needs to be assured that their every purchase or decisionwas the best that could be made. The way a maximizer knows for certain is to consider all the alternatives they can imagine. This creates a psychologically daunting task, which can become even more daunting as the number of options increases. The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. A satisficer has criteria and standards, but a satisficer is not worried about the possibility that there might be something better. Ultimately, Schwartz agrees with Simon's conclusion, that satisficing is, in fact, the maximizing strategy.

Fortunately, not every individual or company needs to struggle with tjhis dillema and perhaps, there must be a different way to separate relavant and good information in order to make good decisions that lead to better business results.

On his blog, Andrew McAfee writes in the case of the Spanish-owned, clothing-chain, Zara - already the world's largest fasion retailer in 2008, where there's a particularly interesting lesson about the kind of information that allows them to sell more at the store level - which spells bottom-line sales success.  As much as Zara's headquarters needed to provide guidance and support-dta  to all it's stores worldwide, it also does something different.  Instead of generating a store-level sales forecast, it relies on its store managers to tell headquarters what they think they could sell immediately at their locations.

Zara is obsessed with making good decisions about what clothes to stock, but has configured itself so that people making these decisions operate in what looks like a ‘data vacuum’ – a lack of aggregated, filtered, and massaged information from throughout the corporation. This is because the good information that Zara’s business model requires is not the kind that’s easy to digitally encode, transmit, aggregate, and analyze. Instead, it’s information that comes from watching, talking, and listening, then using the computer between our ears to pattern match, draw conclusions, and peer just a little bit into the future.

Further on, it is quite interesting what the case of Zara effectively teaches us, as he writes about the three critical business design considerations flow from this belief.

1. Zara spends almost no time on store-level sales forecasting and other similar kinds of data analysis. Cost-wise, it spends less.

2. Zara has moved decision making down very low in the organization, because this is where the relevant knowledge is.

3. Zara gives these decision makers very little market data or other forms of general knowledge.

It is suffice to say that there will always be a place for information served up by computers for business decision-makers. Still, it begs top-level management the question.  Have you got the right people facing your customers and would you trust them to provide the relevant information most important to making the business decisions?  How is it different with your company?

Me?  I might be heading to a Zara store nearby and keep a watchful eye on the store manager.   Sale or not, the lesson he could provide may be as valuable as what the business professors might give us in class.