Decision alignment

Definition and Description
Definition and Description
Decision Alignment, commonly abbreviated "DA", is a methodology, standards and best practices for management consultants, focused on empowering business leaders to have confidence in the decision making process. The markets are changing the way organization are approaching their decision-making processes due to the availability and richness of information, the availability and depth of domain experts and the need to respond rapidly to market conditions.
The DA methodology was developed collaboratively by a group of management consultants experienced with the business issues faced by today’s decision-makers. Just as the Project Management Institute developed the Project Management Body of Knowledge, and the ISO has developed standards for quality, DA seeks to provide processes, templates and best practices for the management of decisions in business.
Why was DA created
DA was created in response to a number of business challenges that affected business performance. Over the 1980's and 1990's, computerization resulted in an information explosion. Business leaders had access to much richer information which increased the confidence and quality of decisions. However, this information tsunami continued to grow to the point that we are now drowning in information. Business leaders don't have the time to sort through conflicting data and confidence in decision dropped through the 1990's.
This information overload gave rise to a number of industries, including Information Management, data harmonization, Enterprise Decision Management, Business Process Management, Business Intelligence and Decision Support Systems. Collectively, these technologies have significantly helped to manage the quality, access and aggregation of information from many sources.
However, business leaders failed to realize on the benefits of these information focused technologies. As business leaders evolved their decision-making processes, collaboration and accountability became key components.
Business leaders feel more confident in their decisions when they :
- trust the information
- have access to the right amount of the right data at the right time
- have a collaborative framework to involve all stakeholders in a decision
- have metrics that demonstrate the alignment of their operations with their business strategy (is the company doing what we should be doing)
- have the ability to archive decisions (accountability, compliance)
The DA was created to provide business leaders with confidence in decision-making by addressing these issues.
Who created DA
The DA methodology was created by a group of management consultants with the objective to improve their effectiveness with a collaborative development of processes, best practices and templates. Interested management consultants can participate by joining this community.
DA Methodology Overview
The DA Methodology consists of
- 3 phases
- 6 processes
- 30 work products / templates
- 70 best practices
What is a Decision
A decision has been defined as "a statement that ends discussion on a topic". There are many other definitions (), but for our purposes, this definition works. The anatomy of a decision shows that it is made up of:
- a statement which summarizes the conclusion or judgement
- a question that was asked
- the information that was considered in the decision
- how the information was viewed
- who participated in the decision
- who made the decision and when
- the discussion threads from the collaboration that supported the decision
In order for decisions to have value in a decision management solution, they must have context. In addition to who made the decision, we also need to know who participated / collaborated. In addition to the information used, we also need to know how it was viewed and analyzed.
How are decisions made
Decisions are based on three core components, information, collaboration and insight / experience. Providing information and analytics is the focus of the Business Intelligence industry. Providing collaborative support for business leaders is an emerging industry.
Business leaders have always based their decisions on the information available. In the past, the volume of information has been sufficiently low that decisions relied more on experience and insight that on the data, and as a result hierarchical decision-making structures worked well. With the plethora of information available today, hierarchical decision-making begins to break down, replaced with a collaborative management style.
The classic paper "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two" suggests that the human mind can handle seven (plus or minus two) "chunks" of information at a time. Yet we are bombarded with thousands of chunks of information. As a result, we have learned to ignore that information that we feel is not relevant to the task at hand. This phenomenon is known as Inattentional Blindness and Change Blindness, and demonstrates why we discard so much information. This also demonstrates why business leaders have migrated to a much more collaborative decision-making style of management. Each person brings a different perspective, a different "set of data", different beliefs, and therefore provides much greater insight to the business issue. Collaboration brings clarity to the conflicting information and reduces stress in decision makers.
Decisions are heavily influenced by our emotional state. The same business leader may make different decisions for the same business issue depending on the emotional state. To date, there is limited research into this phenomenon.
Decisions are also influenced by our character. People that are more impulsive / intuitive will "jump to a conclusion" without considering all the data and analysis. On the other hand, people that are more analytical / introverted will "procrastinate" and suffer from analysis paralysis.
Over the recent years, cognitive researchers have demonstrated that all of the issues discussed above are moderated with collaboration. The impulsive person will be encouraged to consider more information before the final decision, where the procrastinator will be encouraged to make the decision based on "enough information". Collaborative decisions provide many perspectives on the business issue, refining the understanding on the problem and providing more confidence in the decision. Collaboration also improves the adoption success of a decision as people "feel valued".
The Evolution of Decision Making Styles in Business
- hierarchical decision makers (what is the book here ??? reference it)
- multi-dimensional
- collaborative (ipod generation, don’t tell me what I don’t need to know)
Why do we need to manage decisions
Decision yield
Decision Yield is described in the 'Harvard Business Review' article Little Decisions Add Up (referenced in Enterprise Decision Management
Alignment of Business Operations to Business Strategy
- are the operations of an organization aligned with the business strategy?
- how can you tell?
- are the metrics that executive are using to measure the success of the company aligned with the metrics that are used in operations to improve efficiencies
Collaboration and Decisions
- discuss and link to collaboration discussions / papers
- wikinomics - http://en. .org/wiki/Wikinomics
Accountability and Decisions
- SOX
- standards that may emerge as a result on the 2008 economic crisis
Efficiency
- learn from the process and results of past decision in business
- connect to other decision makers / knowledge workers that collaborated on similar decision in the past
- connect to the connectors (tipping point - http://en. .org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point_(book)
How does Decision Alignment compare to other approaches
Business Intelligence - BI provides access and aggregation of data
Enterprise Decision Management - EDM
Business Process Management - BPM
Decision Support Systems
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- NTD- Show diagram positioning all these
- NTD- Evolution of Information Management into Decision Management

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