Decision Support Strategy

Situation

Companies have enormous opportunities through using the right decision support capabilities to make better decisions and significantly improve business performance. However there are a large range of different approaches for achieving this and a large amount of contradictory hype and "silver bullets" being pushed on them from vendors and other sources. Additionally they often start in a poor position with a highly fragmented approach providing little coordination or consistency, with a wide variety of solutions crafted by different groups, with numerous incompatible toolsets and with insufficient control over their underlying data.

Often most or all of an organisation's decision support is historically-based and backwards looking, relying on inconsistent and untested best judgement and rules of thumb to convert the output information and analysis to predicted outcomes. This results in inconsistent, sub-optimal and sometimes completely incorrect decision making.

There are usually significant gaps in the availability and quality of organisations' data and knowledge that are required to support decision making. This results in uncertainty both in the understanding of the underlying mechanics of the business and market and also the current position of the organisation. This will further adversely impact the organisation's decision making capability.

Solutions

Optadian has a wealth of experience in working with organisations to determine a strategy for their decision support based on their current position and then to go further and develop processes, develop architectures, design roles and organisation structures, select decision support toolsets, design tools, educate users and deliver decision support solutions that support value adding decision making.

Example Credentials

Optadian has experience with many clients and their decision support, developing their decision support strategy with them and working with them to implement resulting decision support solutions.

European National Transmission and Distribution Water Utility

Optadian worked with the client to develop their decision support strategy using a review of the current decision support capabilities and previous information strategies as a basis. Using a series of workshops with decision support practitioners within the company and interviews with senior staff responsible for different aspects of the company's information and decision support, a strategy was developed that was provided a view of the role of decision support and how it should be developed.

One of the outputs from the strategy work that was used as an educational tool was the following diagram illustrating different decision support types.

The diagram outlines the different types of decision support which are available, showing that in order to achieve higher supported decision value, more complex analysis is generally required. It also shows the distinction between "backwards looking" analysis that requires best judgement and rules of thumb to be applied in order to support business decisions and "forwards looking" analysis that provides support all the way to the decision making.