Streamlining the Decision Cycle Through Collaborative Decision Managemen

By Randy Frid, Ph.D., Principal Scientist andRandall Eckel, President and Chief Executive Officer, InfoImage

Over the last 20 years, management philosophy has shifted dramatically from command and control organizational methodologies that focused all decision-making at the top of the organization, to a more distributed and enabled management philosophy that pushes decision-making to the front line through “empowered” knowledge workers. Unfortunately, the information systems deployed throughout the organization don’t fully support “empowered” knowledge workers.

The hierarchical organizational model of the command and control era greatly influenced the deployment of business automation systems. Even today, process-improving transaction-oriented systems are deployed department by department. These applications are designed to improve the departmental front- and back-office processes. However, decision-support systems are aimed only at the top of the organization. In other words, decision-making information flows upward, and decisions (and their accompanying instructions) flow downward.

What is needed is an application that improves the productivity of the decision process throughout an organization, with emphasis on improving the process for front-line knowledge workers. To understand how a software application can improve the productivity of the decision process, we need to understand more about this process. Let’s explore two important concepts—the “decision cycle” (the process used by knowledge workers to make a decision) and the “decision network” (the network of people knowledge workers reach out to for information and experience).

The Decision Cycle

In its most basic form, the decision cycle involves gathering relevant information, analysis of that information, collaboration for opinion and insight, making the decision, and taking action. Most decisions are constrained by time. There is a finite amount of time that can be spent in each step of the decision process. Research shows that almost 80% of the time currently spent in the decision cycle is in the information-gathering and collaboration phases, and little time is spent on the actual decision and even less for action.

The Decision Network

When knowledge workers make decisions, they reach out to a network of people who they believe possess relevant information and/or experience. This network of experience usually does not reflect the hierarchical way in which organizations function, but instead cuts horizontally or diagonally across an organization. The size and shape of users’ decision networks are usually limited by span (who do I know that can help?), technology (how do I collaborate with them?), and experience (have I gone down this path before?).Unfortunately, when time is the limiting factor in decision-making, using the existing non-integrated tools that are at the disposal of most knowledge workers (phone, fax, e-mail and meetings) makes moving through the decision cycle a very slow and inefficient process.

Collaborative Decision Management—Optimizing Decision-making Across the Enterprise

A solution is now available that solves this problem. It represents the confluence of collaborative software, knowledge management methodologies and business intelligence solutions—in other words, collaborative decision management. At the center of this solution is a software application called an enterprise decision portal. An enterprise decision portal creates a decision workspace that brings together all the information and experience users need to make fast, quality decisions.

Information and experience from across the organization are now synchronized around a specific task, project or process. These workspaces can be shared across the decision network regardless of location or time zone. Relevant information is now delivered to knowledge workers as opposed to discovered by them.

To see how a decision portal improves the productivity of decision-making, let’s examine how it affects each step in the decision cycle.

Information Gathering

Delivering relevant information is made possible by technology that creates a multi-dimensional meta-data model of the information and experience within a business. This allows users to access the information via easy-to-use taxonomies. Meta-data, or data about data, resident in the decision portal allows for navigation to information without actually searching the information itself. A meta-data repository acts like a directory to information stored in the recesses of the organization or Internet. By exploring or searching the directory, response time is greatly improved and knowledge workers no longer have to know where to look for data.

Collaboration and Experience

While it is important to have relevant information for decision-making, what really contributes to great decisions is experience. Being able to identify and access individuals with relevant experience and facts results in efficient and effective decisions. Decision portals create this opportunity by both identifying relevant experts and then making it easy to share a decision workspace with them.

The Streamlined Decision Cycle

Decision portals fundamentally change the way knowledge workers approach decision-making processes. Their tangible benefit is to speed the information gathering and collaboration processes so that knowledge workers can bring significantly more information and experience to bear, as well as spend more time in the “decision” step of the process. Decision portals provide the technology to truly decentralize and optimize the decision-making process throughout an enterprise and the extended enterprise

Randall W. Eckel, a co-founder of InfoImage, has been President and Chief Executive Officer of InfoImage and a member of the Board of Directors since 1992.

Note: In September of 2002, InfoImage was acquired by ServiceWare, Inc