Enterprise Decision Management: What is It and Its Goal

We often touch on this point that “decisions” i.e. business decisions are the important assets of organizations. They should be explicitly modeled and should become the center of every automation initiative that organizations take, so much so that the Decision-Centric Approach^® establishes and guides the organization on how to make decisions the first-class citizen of the organization.
Organizations should not treat decisions on an ad-hoc basis. Business decisions of any type (e.g. strategic, tactical, and operational) happen too often in organizations. The frequency, volume, and impact of them often change the course of an organization's business operation. If the impact of business decisions is too important, we cannot let them be designed, implemented, and executed by accident. So, what role does enterprise decision management play in solving this problem at hand?

What is Enterprise Decision Management?

Enterprise decision management (EDM) includes all the aspects of designing, deploying, monitoring, and automating business decisions. Some may say not all decisions can or should be automated, which is a valid argument. However, this does not mean they should not be managed.

So let’s see what makes a platform an enterprise decision management platform?

(E) for Enterprise

First things first, it is for an enterprise. This means it should operate at the enterprise level. Meaning, it should enable the whole organization to collaborate on managing business decisions , which has three critical aspects to it:

Wide adoption
Collaboration-enabled platform
Empowering everyone

EDM should be adopted enterprise-wide. It must facilitate breaking down the silos of data, information, and systems. Yes! You can and should start with one system and one decision at a time. Which still benefits the organization; however, organizations should aim and plan for the enterprise-wide adoption to get the most out of it.

The enterprise-wide adoption is only possible if “the platform” i.e. the enterprise decision management platform enables collaboration. This should not surprise anyone that all the decisions across all systems and processes are a bit too much to be handled by a single team, let alone by an individual champion! Together is better.

In order to be able to do it together, the platform should be easy to use by everyone. This does not mean dumbing the requirements down nor giving less credit to what a non-developer or non-technical person is capable of. The exact opposite, the aim here is to give all the leaders in business, operation, and technology the power to manage business decisions.

(D) for Business Decision

In any organization, there are thousands of decisions made every day. In different groups, departments, and teams. About various matters which are translated differently in each industry. And, we specifically said Business Decisions which in fact has two aspects:

All Types of Business Decisions; strategic, tactical, and operational
Modeling and execution dependencies

One of the purposes of EDM is to establish a single source of truth to build trust, gain transparency and consistency. Therefore, the platform for enterprise decision management should account for all the decisions that can be fully automated, i.e. operational decisions as well as decisions that might be semi-automated or manually based on information gathering and analysis (e.i. tactical and strategic decisions). At least, all should be modeled, and organizations should know why a decision is made for a situation; they should be able to back it up and refer to facts and analysis behind the decisions. This takes us to the second point.

Hence, EDM should support all types of decisions; they might be rule-driven, data-driven, and analytical-driven. Also, different techniques may be utilized for automation (if needed). For instance, business rules automation, Machine Learning algorithms, workflow automation, etc.

(M) for Management

Generally, the management part of EDM means it is not only about automation, or modeling, etc., it is about the entire life-cycle of business decisions:

Mining and Extracting
Design and Modeling
Search, Analysis, and Understanding Impact
Automation and Execution
Test, Debug, and Simulation
Defining, Monitoring and Measuring business-oriented KPIs

The Goal

The goal of EDM is to ensure decisions are captured, modeled, and when possible automated. It will establish the single source of truth for organizations. It builds the reference points of whys and hows. It ensures every decision is transparent and the outcomes are consistent.

These cannot be achieved by putting decisions as a side effect of other projects and initiatives in organizations. The decisions must become the center of everything to make this work. Hence there is a need for the methodology and the tool.