Right after my Sparkling welcome to the attendees, James has been taking the floor to share his experience in Decision Management. The tone is both educational and informative, sparkled with examples. I love customer anecdotes.
One important starting point for Decision Management is that it is focusing on operational decisions. In contrast with strategic or tactical decisions, they are made in large volumes. The impact of a single decision may not be significant in itself, but the scale of operational decisions compensates.
By automating decisions, you can re-allocate human resources to refine a consistent behavior, or to manage escalations I would add. The ‘free time’ of expert resources can be effectively spent managing risk or improving decisions in any way that is relevant to the business.
Unfortunately enterprises do not always use Decision Management. In many instances, they:
- wait instead of acting — as they do not know how to handle exceptions
- escalate instead or empowering — as they do not know how to handle exceptions
- report but not learn — as they do not know how to handle exceptions
- inconsistently respond — as they do not know how to handle exceptions
Decision Management aims at addressing these issues.
James recommends 3 stages to better operational decisions:
- Decision Discovery: identify the decisions that are most important to your operational success
- Decision Services: design and build independent decision services to automate these decisions
- Decision Analysis: create a closed loop between operations and analytics to measure results and drive improvement
James claims that Decision Discovery is the most neglected stage. The most valuable decisions to address are often clearly identified by the business owners or by the company board. I do agree that elicitation has been traditionally a more problematic exercise due to a lack of effective techniques. There have been methodologies that emerged from the early efforts. It is exciting to see that nowadays standards are starting to get more widely adopted. Look for more talks on DMN this week.
Learn more about Decision Management and Sparkling Logic’s SMARTS™ Data-Powered Decision Manager
