Jim Sinur of Aragon Research just published The Decision Management Framework Delivers Better Decisions (subscription required):
This research note defines the Decision Management Framework (DMF) so that business and IT leaders will be more equipped to make beneficial decisions for their organizations.
The DMF can be applied to a wide range of business scenarios. It provides a breakdown of each contributing factor to a specific decision with the goal of improving comprehension and creating a channel for better communications among decision influencers and their teams.
This is definitely worth getting – Jim does a great job of outlining why Decision Management matters and why organizations should adopt Decision Management. I strongly agree with the drivers for Decision Management he outlines – that organizations need to make more decisions in real-time and without supervision, so automation is increasingly important, plus the data and analytic environment is richer and more complex than ever, requiring better management of decision-making.
It’s great that he included the Observe-Orient-Decide-Act or OODA loop – it’s a great framework and our experience is that modeling and automating decisions is a key component of making it work IRL, especially for transactional or operational decisions.
His inclusion of the need to consider the past, present and future when making decisions and his focus on the time available to decide are also important. We find that the time available for decisions is often overestimated by clients, generally needs to be significantly reduced to drive a better customer experience and is increasingly trending to zero thanks to mobile devices and the IoT.
Lastly, it was good to see that he included the full range of technologies in his framework – from rules and decision-logic to data mining, predictive analytics, machine learning and AI. These technologies must be combined if their value is to be maximized and Jim makes that clear using several interesting concepts such as vagueness and the need for freedom from central control.
Here at Decision Management Solutions we’re big believers in the need for a coherent Decision Management approach supported by a rich set of Decision Management technologies. Our approach is based around the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard, which we consider the most effective approach to decision modeling – something else Jim recommends.
You should get Jim’s report -and keep an eye out for his next one on the platform you need – but in the meantime check out the Decision Management Systems Platform Technology Report, buy Decision Management Systems if you want a great book about Decision Management and contact us if you want to learn more about our unique DecisionsFirst approach to Decision Management.