This editorial was originally published on June 23, 2010. It is being re-run as Steve is on vacation.

As good as our computers systems can be, as helpful as they are in our daily lives or in business, we still need a human in the loop. If you have any doubt, look at this story. A woman is suing Google after Google Maps suggested she walk along a highway and she was struck by a car.

There's a real danger in not using your own intuition, your own experience, or just common sense to decide on a course of action. Computers can be programmed to do many things, but finding subtle meanings and relationships isn't necessarily one of them. The analysis done by computers isn't better than that of humans, it's just faster.

And with bad programming, the wrong answer is just arrived at quicker by a computer.

Business Intelligence systems aren't built to do the work for us. While we do have automated systems that decide upon courses of action (reorder inventory, route trucks, etc.), most of the BI systems are designed to help us work with large amounts of data. They help us find patterns. They help us to focus on parts of the data that we might not otherwise look at closely. They aren't there to make decisions for us.

Even in many science fiction views of the future, we don't allow computers to make all the decisions. Usually humans are still deciding on a course of action and then allowing the computer to merely carry it out.

I think we still need to ensure that a human evaluates the suggestions that a computer makes, using human experience to actually make the decisions.