Jumadi Francisco Simangunsong Web Blog

How Organization make better decision

sumber: www.mis-asia.com

How does your organisation decide what strategies and business models to pursue, which products and services to offer, which customers to target, what prices to charge and what employees to hire? One poor decision now can lead to a poor outcome later.

The most striking finding in the How Organizations Make Better Decisions report is that organisations employed a variety of intervention types involving technology, organisational changes, and new business methods. Analytical interventions were the most commonly adopted, followed by culture and leadership. In order to implement these interventions, decision analysts had to adopt a more consulting-oriented role within their organisations.

Businesses and organisations have addressed many aspects of their structure and function, but relatively few have given systematic attention to one of their most important activities: their decisions.

Decisions, whether tactical or strategic, are critical to the success of every organisation. They encompass such questions as what strategies and business models to pursue, which products and services to offer, which customers to target, what prices to charge, and what employees to hire. Organisations that employ poor decision processes and tools will eventually encounter poor decision outcomes, and their performance will suffer.

There are many other reasons why organisations should improve key decisions. The recent financial crisis was a reminder that poor decisions have both company-specific and economy-wide consequences.

More positively, there are new insights, technologies, and methods that can guide decisions. Scientific advances in neuroscience and behavioural economics provide new insights for decision-making.

Relatively new technologies, including analytics, decision automation tools, and business intelligence systems, make it possible to make better use of information in decisions. ‘Wisdom of crowds’ approaches and technologies allow larger groups of people to participate meaningfully in decision processes. Organisations cannot afford to ignore these new options if they wish to make the best possible decisions.

This report summarises the many ways organisations have improved their decision-making processes, specifically using business analytics. Business analytics help companies identify innovative ways to increase profits, reduce risk, predict trends and make confident, fact-based decisions using real-time data. Better business decisions mean better business. And better business makes for happier customers.

Take ComSuper, an Australian Commonwealth Government Agency. When it modernised and consolidated its Information Management, it was able to view its data in context, irrespective of its source – a single source of the truth.

‘A single end-to-end solution has had additional benefits due to the savings in effort through utilising the SAS common metadata repository,’ said Kevin Hilder, Director, Information Management, ComSuper.

Before it revamped its Information Management, ComSuper created its reports in a variety of spreadsheets and databases. Hilder explained: ‘These came from all around the organisation and while meeting requirements were not managed in a consistent nor sustainable way. Even the definition of data was dealt with differently by various subject matter experts and report authors.’

Later, SAS won the tender for an end-to-end solution and Business Intelligence (BI) framework to integrate all its data and create a sustainable business intelligence reporting system, when ComSuper decided that ‘SAS won both the data integration and business intelligence tenders on their independent merits as we found that each of their proposals represented a best-fit solution for ComSuper. A single end-to-end solution has had additional benefits due to the savings in effort through utilising the SAS common metadata repository, which sits at the core of the SAS architecture,’ said Hilder.

Reaction within ComSuper has been very positive. Managers now have access to current, accurate and relevant information and have greater confidence in their reports.

These managers are now enjoying ‘the timely delivery of information. Previously, the latency of the information they were getting was a cause for concern. Now, by contrast, our delivery of reports is on time – daily, weekly, monthly – depending on the report type,’ said Hilder.

Which goes to show, analytical interventions do lead to more accurate and relevant information for better decisions.