The Power Of Decisioning
Smart organisations are increasingly using decisioning to help model their corporate decision making knowledge in a form that allows access by both the business and its electronic systems.
Decisioning can be defined as: 'acquiring and leveraging proprietary knowledge through the systematic discovery, classification, specification and automation of the decisions that drive your business'.
And in this context, a decision is: 'the application of proprietary knowledge to interpret and evaluate situational data to achieve the purpose of the enterprise'.
Decisioning allows the organisation to extend and control its business processes by inserting plug-and-play software components directly into the processes, thereby implementing fast, reliable, automated decision-making.
Decisioning is the business user's "remote-control", guiding and directing the computerised processes as they go about their business, quickly and accurately.
By combining decisioning with your data, you create a dynamic, knowledge-based enterprise that can adapt quickly to opportunities and threats - a 'learning organisation'.
Let's envisage a scene where you are confronted with a market change that requires your organisation to respond differently - in other words, new decisions are required.
In a decision-centric system, you simply use the power of the decisioning layer to implement timely, efficient decision logic changes. Being able to develop, model, test, and deploy your decision-making in "market-time" is the key to business agility.
The weight of the time-draining 'system development life cycle' is only required when you need to add new structural capabilities to the infrastructure. Decisions are the most dynamic of the systems components - new decision models can be created as fast as the business can learn. But our traditional systems methodologies are highly resistant to dynamic requirements. By segregating out responsibility for decisioning, we remove a burden from the old juggernaut development process, reserving its costly and resource intensive SDLC for development of core infrastructure and capability.
Furthermore, compliance with decision making guidelines in such critical areas as the assessment and acceptance of clients, products, prices and terms, is usually a corporate, if not a legal, imperative. Many organizations invest heavily in training, processes and systems to ensure that line decisions comply with these declared guidelines. Decisioning is an approach that compliments this by ensuring that relevant guidelines are applied automatically "at the point of sale" to ensure provable, auditable compliance at all times.
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