James Taylor's Decision Management

This week I thought I would write about decision-centric organizations. Organizations face many challenges in today's business climate. Organizations whose success or failure is determined by the decisions they make (which claims to pay, which customers to target, which transactions to investigate for fraud) are handicapped by systems that are centered on processes or functions. As a result, these organizations struggle to improve business productivity while managing costs and find it hard to make changes in their systems quickly, despite a pressing need to do so. To succeed, these organizations need to move their thinking from processes and functions to decisions. They need to become a decision-centric organization as only a decision-centric organization is going to be able to deliver agility, control, compliance, personalization and decision support in a coherent, integrated way.

Decision-centric organizations deliver agility because they can make rapid changes to the way they conduct business. Decisions are the changeable elements of most operations and rapidly changing policy or regulation and competitive pressures affect these decisions, not the processes or functions within which they are made. Decision-centric organizations deliver the business control executives want over operations by giving them control over the decisions that drive day to day operations and implement business strategy. These decisions are compliant, and demonstrably so, because those who understand the regulations are driving the decision with no IT/business disconnect.

A decision-centric organization maximizes straight through processing, delivers consumer- and information-driven processes that are infinitely customizable and that flow easily from automation to case management and back again. Decision-centric organizations gain operational advantages and a competitive edge through a systematic focus on decision making throughout the organization. Decision-centric organizations deliver increased agility by decoupling the IT and business lifecycles and it dramatically reduces the complexity of IT and hence its cost.

Decisions have always been at the core of an organization's behavior but for too long they have been buried, considered only as part of an organizational function or a business process. Such buried decisions are rarely automated effectively, are hard to improve and the lack of explicit management of these decisions leaves organizations at a loss to know how to maximize their effectiveness.

Tomorrow, the focus on decisions.