What is Decision Management?
Decision Management is a discipline with sets of tools and techniques that allow businesses to make decisions.
What is Decision Management?
Decision Management is a discipline with sets of tools and techniques that allow businesses to make decisions.
Decision Management
Where does It Belong?
Analytics Definition
Gartner defines Analytics as a discipline that applies business logic and mathematics to data to provide insights for making better decisions.
Descriptive Analytics tell you what happened, but do not specify what to do about it.
Diagnostic Analytics let you explore how it happened, but do not specify what to do about it.
Predictive Analytics tell you what is likely in the future, but do not specify what to do about it.
Prescriptive Analytics specify what to do, or automatically trigger a response.
Decision Management is part of Prescriptive Analytics which enables Organisations to model Operational Decisions and Automatically trigger a Response.
Not Just a Type of Software
Decision Management is a discipline with sets of tools and techniques that allow businesses to make decisions.
Decision Management has Emerged from Five Areas
Data and Analytics
Accessing and processing data using descriptive, diagnostics, and predictive techniques.
Business Process Management
Orchestrating the human tasks and steps of the business process for automation and task management.
Operations Research
Optimizing and handling competing goals based on criteria and priorities that can be modelled.
Business Rules Management
Managing and automating business rules driven by Subject Matter Experts.
Robotics
Mimicking humans behaviour on using software to automate taking actions and interacting in software systems.
Decision management deals with systems that go beyond descriptive and predictive analysis to specify the best course of actions to take, or to compute a judgement or conclusion that solves a problem.
Goal of Decision Management
Decision management aims to improve the intelligence of business operations by enabling fast, consistent and precise fact-based decisions. It improves the quality of complex, structured operational decisions.
When should organisations use Decision Management?
When effectiveness and efficiency matter to the business operations.
Repeatable
When a decision is made repetitively and regularly it is worth to automate and will have a good ROI in automation. For example, decisions that happen per specific cases, per customers, per items and etc.
Non-Trivial
High Impact
Decisions with the highest business impact should have the higher priority for automation. The higher the impact is, the higher business value and easier to show the value of decision management.
Characteristics of the Good Candidates:
- Multiple decision criteria or substantial calculations.
- A lot of data and diverse kinds of data.
- Reusable decision logic that is frequently modified.
- Traceable and auditable decision making.
- Trade-offs among competing goals.
- Multiple decisioning scenarios acting together as a whole.
Manage Operational Decisions
Value of Decision Management is maximised when end-to-end decision automation is considered and Decision-Centric Approach® is utilised.
Where Decision Management can be Used?
Business Situations where It is a Must
The key is to pick the right problem to solve. These are the situations where you can apply and utilize decision management:
Multiple Business Rules
Involves at least a handful of business rules
Business Knowledge
Requires business domain knowledge and expertise (avoid application and system rules if possible)
Changes
Requires frequent changes driven by regulatory, law, external bodies, policies, etc.
Complexity
Is inherently complex in nature; for instance, requires multiple levels of reasoning
Adaptability
Needs adapting and adjusting based on numerous changing criteria
Time-to-Market
Demands speedy time-to-market delivery
How to Practise Decision Management at Scale
Putting Methodology and Technology Together
Over the years, we have put together a comprehensive guideline called Decision-Centric Approach® on whys, hows, and core principles of business decisions in practice. This unique way of thinking enables organizations to adopt decision management successfully and helps them to:
- Identify and extract business decisions from (code, excel, business processes, heads of domain experts, etc.)
- Clearly describe and understand them
- Capture them visually i.e., model them
- Prioritize and link them to quantifiable business values
- Identify and capture the influencers and authorities
Explore the Use Cases of Decision Management
Across Functions and Areas of Business
Millions of operational decisions are made every day in businesses. The quality of decisions directly influences the quality of business operations. Decisions are influenced by data, regulations and market dynamics.
Because of this, you can see the use of decision management across many different industries and many different areas of business.
Financial
- Mortgage Approval
- Insurance and Loan Underwriting
- Financial Trading
- Leasing and Billing
Corporate
- Supply Chain Management
- Product Configuration
- Risk Management
- Cross-Selling
- Logistics
Public Sector
- Permit Approval
- Subsidy Determination
- Welfare
- Taxes
