Week 9 - Journal

Research and Decision Making

The impact of research on the decision making process will greatly depend on the extent of the research being conducted, with higher levels of research yielding more accurate but more costly to produce results. Depending on the time-frame for the required decision, fitting in at least some level of research will likely lead to a better outcome. Deciding without research will be quicker and can be required at times where time is short, this is where having experienced people around you will be immensely helpful.

As an example, I can consider how research would have impacted a recent project that I was involved in that involved building a website. In this project we built the website from scratch and uploaded it to a server. The selection of the server was decided based upon input from both faculty and students, and our eventual decision to use Amazon Web Services meant our website could be quickly uploaded and ran but did give us a major hiccup down the road. Getting HTTPS encrypted communication was proving to be a real pain, and negatively effected our efforts to get the final version running, especially because we were implementing a password authentication system that relied on encrypted traffic.

More research done at the start of the project might have steered away from AWS if we knew of the complications it would introduce. This realization would be dependent on how thorough we were with the research, obviously if we didn't specifically check to see how easily verified HTTPS could be enabled it would probably not effect the outcome. What would have probably been needed is to have each team member (there were 6 of us) research a specific category, someone researching security might have come across how AWS handles HTTPS and alerted the team of the findings. A week spent on this would probably not have negatively effected out outcome at all, and could possibly have made us aware of some upcoming challenges (if we still decided to go with AWS).

In the end it is really a time tradeoff, can you afford to sacrifice some time to gather accurate information before making a decision? I would say the trade-off is almost always worth it, but I can understand that there are times where the time simply isn't there.