Helping computers make "better" decisions

An interesting poll recently over on KDnuggetsas to whether computers can make better decisions by mining historical data than people can with intuition. The results seem to me to be split - some think yes, some think yes unless (as is common) the world continues to change and some say no. This debate is part of what drove the concept of Enterprise Decision Management - that the combination of rules (derived from human experience or intuition) and analytics (derived from data) is the best way to automate and improve decision-making. Indeed if you read books on cognition you will often see discussions around how well-informed (analytically-enhanced) intuition is very effective in decision making. I blogged about this topic in my review of Blink and when I was discussing Larry Rosenberger's keynote at InterACT on the future of analytics.