Understanding the value of your everyday organizational decisions

One of the things that I believe most organizations could do a better job of is explicitly understanding what decisions they need to make. Now most organizations certainly understand that they need to make decisions. They may also understand what information goes into those decisions fairly well. They may even have some standard reports available to support them but what I don’t see very often is a decision register or an explicit listing of all the decisions that a specific organization or a specific role is responsible for.

I think that’s a big weakness because it’s very hard to do decisions support, develop meaningful business analytics, or generate a return on investment on a decisions support or business intelligence system when you’re not sure what decisions need to be made in anything other than a general sense. You don’t understand what the value of those decisions is to the organization. By value I mean if you’re going to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on a decisions support system, you should understand what the real value of making those decisions is to your organization; otherwise it’s going to be hard to sustain that program over time.

I think it’s worth taking a few minutes and looking at it because if you’ve been in an organization a long time you probably know in your head what those decisions are. You just need to take the time to run down that list, vet it with a couple other folks, and already you are much farther along than you otherwise would be in terms of understanding how your organization works. You can work forward from there to develop the informational inputs that support those decisions to develop business intelligence, or analytics to support those decisions but it all starts with knowing what they are and what they are worth to the organization. So this was just something that is simple that I was thinking about that we could all do a better job of and will have a large impact on an organization.