Your decisions will be based on the information that you handle in the decision-making process. How you can decide if you don’t have the right information, in the right form on the right place? You need information sources reliable to make a right decision for your small business.
Information is one of the most important resources for your company. If in the past, we talk only about human, financial and material resources, today we cannot exclude information as a resource. Information is something that creates knowledge in your business, and knowledge increases your business potential energy.
Let’s talk about possible information sources that you can use in your decision-making process.
1. Information Sources Located In Your Business
A good starting point in getting information for business decision is your own business. If your business collects, classify and store data in any useful format, the process will be much easier. However, if your company has big amounts of data, where some of them are unwanted or useless, it can be a time-consuming process to find something relevant to the specific decision making process.
Many times, you can find and get some useful data from your colleagues, but it depends on a good cooperation between them. On a different hierarchical level, there are different data.
You need to implement a systematic approach for collecting, classifying and storing useful data in your business. Use following information sources for your decision making process that are inside your company:
- Internal statistics
- IT department
- Finance department
- Sales department
- Colleagues
- Researchers
- Business library
- Market research
- Internal formal communication tools
- Internal informal communication tools
- Meeting minutes
2. Information Sources Located Outside Your Business
Your business is not the alone in the galaxy called as a market. Many different entities will be there that have the power to influence your business decisions. Because of that, you can’t base your decisions only on your internal information sources.
Useful ideas, worth data and contributions can come from outside your business. There are many experts, many individual sources and world wide web that can be useful for your business.
Use following information sources for your decision making process that are outside your company:
- Family
- Friends
- Contacts
- Competitors
- Stakeholders
- Events
- Publications
- Press Releases
- Consultants
- External Researchers
- Universities
- Media
- Internet
- Social Media
- Research publications
- Industry news
