Big Sky Thinking

James Taylor over at Enterprise Decision Management has written a nice summary of a recent interview he completed with DMReview on "The Art of the Decision." James' piece is a very nice complement to Manoj' post below on the appropriate unit of analysis for decision making.

Manoj explains with great clarity the importance of using processes as the unit of analysis for decisionmaking. This allows organizations to avoid organizational conflicts and maximize the leverage of the decisions it makes.

James' post goes on to explain how, once quality process design is in place and is the basis of continuous improvement, additional gains may be made by focusing on incoming data and metadata. Manoj also states, "any meaningful action plan would have to focus on coordinating the entire supply chain all the way back from customer orders, to the distribution center, to the manufacturing plants, and then to the suppliers." The point: an organization can learn a great deal, and dramatically increase decisionmaking efficiency, by knowing something about the very first pieces of information that come in the door.

Manoj's and James's posts present a compelling argument: making maximum use of the data incoming from a customer (or at the process initiation) can avoid decision conflicts and errors later on in the process. In Manoj's post, an organization had trouble when decisionmaking was being done at three levels of the organization simultaneously. The shift of focus onto a process as the unit of analysis, combined with making proper use of the data initiating the process, can reduce those conflicts and improve the process result. The process and the information within it become as valuable as the goods and services migrating through the process.