An essential ingredient of business success is the ability to make the right decisions at the right time.

How you make a series of routine, critical decisions is the key to differentiating your business in the market – and to achieving the outcomes that you need to thrive as an organisation.

Your business, whether it is a commercial, government, or other enterprise, is really driven by a series of time-critical decisions.

Decisions govern every aspect of your corporate processes. By way of example, decisions governing a sales process might include:

• What products/services can/will I offer?
• Will I do this business with this client?
• At what price or cost?
• Under what terms and conditions?
• And, what do I need to do next?

To operate effectively, what you know as an organisation needs to be strongly reflected in your decision-making behaviour.

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.

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.

For more information
Idiom Ltd
www.idiomsoftware.com
Ph 09 377 7486

Idiom Ltd markets the IDIOM Decision Suite and related products, enabling business users to define their core business knowledge directly into business computer systems using IDIOM’s graphical user interface.

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