Are you ready for decision management? Part 5 - James Taylor's Decision Management

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December 01, 2006
Are you ready for decision management? Part 5

How do you tell if your organization is ready for decision management? If not, what can you do to start laying the groundwork?

Fifth, Focus on operational decisions

One of the key facets of decision management is its focus on operational decisions. In order for decision management projects to be successful you need to get management to consider operational decisions as worth improving and amenable to improvement. While this may not sound hard, it can be. Some managers are very focused on "being strategic" or on "big picture" issues. Working on improving the small, incremental decisions that drive the business operations may not sound important enough to apply their time and energy. Additional it takes a certain focus to consider these decisions - one must stop thinking about macro-decisions like "campaign design" and start thinking about micro-decisions like "offer for this customer". Old habits can die hard and make this difficult to master.

One effective way to get management attention is to focus on the decisions, the operational decisions, that support a particular business strategy. Let's say the organization is trying hard to retain more customers. Many operational decisions, from routing calls to call center representatives to retention offers to self-service might contribute to customer retention problems. Showing executives that improving these operational decisions can have a direct impact on their strategic goals can get their attention. Perhaps even more effective is asking them how long they think it would take the organization to change to respond to a new strategy. Given how unresponsive to change many information systems are and how often decisions are redundantly spread between many systems, the answer may be distressing. Focusing on automating the contributing operational decisions can improve the alignment of operational systems with the business and so make changing, and managing, strategy more realistic.

Another issue that comes up as you start to use analytics in decision-making is a tendency for management to trust "gut instinct" over data. While this is a generally unhelpful attitude for anyone trying to introduce analytically-driven decisions it can be overcome more easily for an operational decision than for a strategic one. Think about it - who's "gut" is being used to make an operational decision? Not the CEO, not senior management, not even (probably) a highly trained professional but a low-level employee talking to a customer. Why would your management want customer-facing operational decisions made by such an employee based on their "gut instinct"? Most managers would, I suspect, prefer to have at least some degree of analytic support for these kinds of decisions. Finding stories about how important customers were put off by operational decisions made incorrectly can help focus management attention on the need to automate and improve these decisions and overcome a reluctance to trust the data.

In general you are going to need management support so try and focus on projects that have an impact on business areas that have management who "get it". Here are a couple of useful links:

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