Data and Decisions - Graham Olsen

Organisations run on decisions.

This book explores how those decisions are made, how they depend on data, and how both can be improved - and, increasingly, automated. Its central claim is bold but simple: every organisation is a decision factory, and the route to optimisation is through decision intelligence.

It explains how data is sourced, structured and delivered; how AI systems - especially large language models - actually work; and where their limits lie. It shows what these systems can do, where they fail, and why.

Grounded in practical experience, it introduces decision architecture: a framework for using data and AI to build more effective organisations - and to prepare for the dawn of the zero-payroll enterprise, in which many decisions no longer require us at all.