Decision Analytics for Managers and Analysts

A key part of managing an organization is making decisions. Decision involve choosing between options and understanding the impact of changes in the decision factors. Having the most achievable, accurate, and meaningful decision results improves the overall performance of any organization. Decisions are part of processes, performance reporting, incident response and direction interest. Decisions are expansive covering the overall direction of an organization in response to external threats or very detailed providing input to options in a process.

Specific tools, methods and techniques provide the insight and options when choice situations appear. Tools such as spreadsheets can provide some input to a decision, but the best approach is to use tools that provide consideration for influences and alternatives based on likely probabilities that conditions may happen. To evaluate options, specific types of models and analytics provide better insight than looking at tables of numbers.

The KCI preferred tool for these types of analysis and decision support is the DPL/9 decision and influence modeling product from Syncopation. Like business analytics tools, decision tools require focused workflows to get the most use out of them. KCI provides these workflows for key types of decisions typical of managers today.

DPL/9 is a decision modeling management tool that provides managers with easy to use modeling structures for analyzing decision options. With the Excel input option managers and analysts can prepare the basic model in Excel, add probabilities, data values, influences and decision factors. Multiple sets of data values can be added to view several alternatives or changes in the meaning of the model over time.

Using Decision Tools such as DPL/9
Decision solutions like business analytics can be applied from various perspectives, for example, at a high level (such as market penetration options) or at a more detailed operational level (granting credit or approving a sale).

Here are two of the solution workflows KCI provides for organizations looking to improve decision making. Each of these insights are used to guide the user by applying decision modeling capabilities in easy to use workflows.