Decision Support System
Why is decisioning important? Decisions are the critical mechanism by which we choose one action from the set of all possible actions. The purpose of a decision is to select the action that is most beneficial to the decision maker in a given situation. A decision is 'made' when we resolve the available data to a single definitive outcome - a decision cannot be multi-valued, ambiguous or tentative. The derivation of the decision outcome is achieved by applying discipline, knowledge and experience to the data within a specific context. It is this application of discipline, knowledge and experience that most closely defines the unique character of any business.
Business Decision:
A single definitive outcome that is the result of applying business knowledge to relevant data for the purpose of beneficially directing the activity of the business.
The desire or need to regulate and control system responses to give a zero touch process is ensuring that decisioning is becoming a core function of many modern systems.
In these systems decisioning drives the discovery of data and its relevance to the business - the need for the decision drives the need for the data. And because the decision outcome predicates the process response, it also implicitly drives the process definition.
Businesses do not make a decision merely because they have available data, nor do they act without making a decision. Decisions are clearly identifiable as the heart of any automated systems response.
If decisions are core drivers of the data and process elements of a system, they are also drivers of other decisions. For instance, the decision to accept insurance business depends in turn on decisions regarding the customer, the insured risk, price, and underwriting terms. Each decision can also depend on other decisions until a tree structured model of decisions is formed - the decision model.
Our experience has shown that decisions are the fastest and easiest of the system design elements (i.e. of data, process, decision) to discover and model. The decision model is the core of business knowledge. The decision model then provides a fast-track to the discovery and modelling of data and processes, giving rise to a 'decision oriented' system.
The systemisation of decision discovery, definition, and deployment, including the execution of deployed decisions, is the basis of the new discipline of 'decisioning'.
Find out more about the Idiom Decision Support System