Decision effectiveness: the key to an organisation’s success?

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The importance of decision effectiveness

According to Harvard Business Review, a company's value is the sum of the decisions it makes and executes. The research they conducted showed that decision effectiveness and financial results correlated at a 95% confidence level or higher for every country, industry, and company size in the sample. It's clear that decision effectiveness is key to a organisation's success.

To improve the value of an organisation, we should thus pay more attention to the decision making process. While strategic decisions are often carefully planned out and analyzed, the operational decisions aren't handled with the same care. Yet it's exactly these decisions the organisation takes every single day. You need to invest time in the key operational decisions of your organisation to increase their effectiveness. This will save you time in turn, and more importantly, will have a considerable impact on your firm.
We've identified some key aspects of effective decision making:

  • the business logic and rules behind the decision should be understandable and clear to everyone in the business
  • the business should take responsibility of the decisions being made, and the logic behind them
  • the business logic should be easy to adapt
  • the decisions should be consistent and complete
  • there should be a clear path to trace a conclusion back to the rules it was based upon so as to improve the auditability of the firm

However in most organisations, these key aspects aren't present. The business logic is often unclear, either locked up in endless documents of rules and regulations or in a black box of code created by IT. The co-workers are required to know the business rules and logic by heart, which leads to frequent misinterpretations, mistakes, inconsistent results and manual fixes.

The answer?

You can easily improve your decision management by implementing decision modeling. Figure out which operational decisions are key to your organisation's success. Structure them into decision models (you don't need any technical knowledge to do this) and automate them afterwards. This ensures that your decisions will be consistent and reliable, but also that you can easily trace them back and adapt them when necessary. Last but not least, automated decision making will help you take decisions at a much faster pace.

Learn how to implement decision modeling

It's important to know how to successfully create decision models before implementing them in your organisation. On December 6 and 7, we are organizing a training on decision management and decision modeling using the international Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard. The 2-day training offers a practical guide to creating decision models for both business and IT employees, and is suitable for any interested party as no prior knowledge of decision modeling is required.
Interested in following our training? You can read all about it here!

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