Five Keys To Implementing Effective Decisioning
Having set out above the compelling reasons organisations have for embracing decisioning, how do you go about achieving an effective decisioning environment? Here are five things to consider.
Firstly, focus on decisions. If you are going to succeed at automating decisions, then you need to make decision-making the critical design focus - not processes, not business rules, not even data. Your business will succeed because of high quality, consistent and timely decision-making. The rest, as they say, is history!
Secondly, get the right people. Decisioning is a new discipline, and should be led by one or more business analysts who work hand-in-hand with domain experts to capture, refine, and test the decision models that will drive your business in a continuous cycle of improvement. The role of the domain experts is to learn from the market and to create new corporate behaviour that complies with governance requirements; the business analysts consolidate this new behaviour into practical, complete, and verified decision models - if you are lucky, these skills will be found in one person, making the process even more efficient.
Thirdly, re-target your IT development. The purpose of your core systems, and therefore of your IT supplier, must be re-targeted towards providing a platform for the deployment and execution of automated decisions. In support of this they will need to acquire, store and supply data as they have always done. And they will still need to implement the capabilities that respond to the decisions made. But in a sea-change of significant dimensions, both of these development requirements are now "decision driven".
Fourthly, understand that your approach to the development of your business systems will change. First and foremost, within your business you will build models of your decision-making. These are the core specifications for systems development – if your systems don’t support your critical decision-making, what are you automating?
From the decision models you will determine the data that the decisions require, and the processes that will supply it. And for each decision made, you will determine the appropriate system response. The decision model is the core specification - all other data, processes and features exist to serve that purpose either directly or indirectly.
And when the system is built and implemented, you will continue to develop and evolve the decision models to reflect new learning. This may periodically require upgrades to the system infrastructure, and so the cycle continues. But this time, the most dynamic, business critical component is at the heart of the system design, under the watchful eye of business experts, easily adapted, always changing.
And finally, get some decisioning tools to help define and manage your portfolio of decision making know-how, and having done so, to keep it accessible but safe - it is your critical IP, the knowledge that defines your corporate essence.
| Please direct any comments or questions to Mark Norton. | Decisions,Decisions.pdf2 page PDF file (102KB) |
 
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