Reading Time: 5 minutesThe pandemic has completely transformed the way we live life and do business. Over the last two years, we have learned how important it is to be flexible and agile in our decision-making. According to a recent survey by Gartner, “65% of respondents said the decisions they make are more complex than just two years ago, and 53% said they face more pressure to explain or justify their decisions.” Workplaces have become more agile, and if the previous two years have taught us anything, it’s that business leaders, stakeholders, and associates must use data systems to advise their decisions.
Nearly three billion business decisions are made annually, and research by Bain shows “a 95% correlation between decision effectiveness and financial performance.” This new method, fortified by recent technological advances, has led to a new class of Decision Intelligence solutions and products designed to augment and amplify business users’ decision-making capabilities.
These automated decision intelligence tools and technologies transform how decisions are made in a business and are quickly becoming accepted. By 2023, Gartner projects that “more than one-third of large organizations will have analysts practicing Decision Intelligence, including decision modeling.”
This blog explores what Decision Intelligence technology actually is and how such Decision Intelligence solutions can transform the data-to-decisions journey for enterprises.
What is Decision Intelligence?
According to Gartner, Decision Intelligence is:
“A practical domain framing a wide range of decision-making techniques bringing multiple traditional and advanced disciplines together to design, model, align, execute, monitor and tune decision models and processes. Those disciplines include decision management (including advanced nondeterministic techniques such as agent-based systems) and decision support as well as techniques such as descriptive, diagnostics, and predictive analytics.”
While the Gartner definition is quite exhaustive, it essentially boils down to using data science and analytics to make better decisions, making Decision Intelligence solutions now a critical part of the modern business cycle.
For us at Fosfor, Decision Intelligence technology empowers business users to make better and faster decisions every day by allowing business users to quickly ask and get insights that not only explain the “What” but also the “Why,” “What will be,” and “What-if.”
At its core, Decision Intelligence uses a set of advanced capabilities such as Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to transform the organization’s data into intelligent insights. When it comes to applications for business users, Decision Intelligence software solutions systems allow these leaders to get insights as quickly as asking their favorite search engine for recommendations for their evening dinner plans.
Of course, one of the key questions that IT and analytics teams are grappling with is what is the difference between Business Intelligence and Decision Intelligence?
The difference between Decision Intelligence and Business Intelligence
Let’s take a step back and think about BI in our organizations. Most organizations that have BI teams are still struggling to keep up with the constant need for business leaders and decision-makers to understand “why has this happened?” While BI regularly makes business users aware of their KPIs, every time there is a need to understand the “Why,” the business needs to go back to the BI and Decision Support teams. This cycle can be cumbersome and makes decision-making challenging because business intelligence users cannot extract insights quickly and across different datasets.
Another major challenge with BI is that the core users for BI tend to be analysts or IT teams comfortable working with products that require a basic understanding of data and data structures. In contrast, Decision Intelligence technology is meant for consumers and analysts and generally has a very intuitive question-and-answer capability that enables business users to ask plain-language questions and get insights.
Regardless of their pitfall, it is crucial to have business intelligence and Decision Intelligence tools working together holistically. The combination gives you a better understanding of the history and current state of your business, allows you to dig into interesting trends and anomalies, and explore future scenarios easily.
Can Decision Intelligence solutions help if you already have DSML and AI Tools?
Another question that organizations are also grappling with is in managing their Directory Services Markup Language (DSML) tools. Business leaders often ask, “We also have DSML and AI products. They were brought in to help us make better decisions, so do we need decision intelligence technology?
The simple answer is yes – DSML, AI, and Decision Intelligence tools can work together to simplify and enhance decision-making.
DSML and AI tools are standard in stakeholder decision-making. However, many businesses wonder if they need Decision Intelligence tools if they already have these other technologies in place. While DSML and AI tools focus on taking data and getting insights, they do so in a raw format. Similar to BI tools, data scientists are necessary to get the most out of these tools. Decision Intelligence tools, however, are much more user-friendly.
Overall, Decision Intelligence solutions focus on C-suite-friendly technology to give you the most intuitive tools imaginable. Decision Intelligence tools enable you to be more productive without needing the technical skills of ML or AI engineers. Still, the truth is that all of these technologies have a place in the whole decision-making ecosystem. Leveraging an appropriate Decision Intelligence tool may bring some unique benefits to the table when it comes to helping businesses use data to make better decisions.
A real-world example
Let’s look at an example of the Fosfor Decision Cloud (or the FDC) customer who utilizes a combination of BI, Decision Intelligence, and DSML technologies within their decision ecosystem.
This customer uses BI tools to schedule and burst necessary reports to monitor business KPIs and raw metrics such as market performance. Additionally, they employ DSML products and Data Science teams to create pricing and promo spending strategies for the market.
The FDC, their Decision Intelligence solution of choice, fortified the brand and category managers’ decision-making capacity by empowering them with the right Decision Intelligence tools.
The FDC enables:
- A deep dive into their market performance
- A deep understanding of key drivers of change
- Publication of comprehensive data stories by analysts
- Meticulous analyses that comprehend diverse external and internal datasets
Within hours of a data refresh, these teams can query and get insights on the fly with deep market dives–a process that would previously have taken most analyst teams weeks to publish but expedited by the FDC’s Decision Designer.
The FDC’s business benefits
This next iteration of C-suite technology enables executives to make more informed choices when running their businesses using automated tools. A Fall 2022 survey by Gartner found that “80% of executives think automation can be applied to any business decision.”
To this end, we created a tool that allows users to understand the “What,” “Why,” “What will be,” and the “What-if’.” The FDC’s Decision Designer can even help you find hidden causes and predict future scenarios, all in plain English.
Some of the key benefits that we see across organizations include the following:
- Reduced time to insights: For not just the “What” but also higher-order diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive questions such as “Why,” “What-if,” and “What will be” – all the critical questions are answered by the FDC’s Decision Intelligence capabilities.
- Higher adoption rates: Compared to BI for business users, the FDC’s Decision Intelligence is simpler to incorporate into standard processes due to the flexibility to query in natural language.
- Self-service on the rise: Using our Decision Intelligence technology, business users are more comfortable discovering the “What” and “Why” in simple English within their data. The FDC’s first-in-class explainability layer offers business users a space to comfortably ask questions that the system answers by creating models on the fly.
- Data monetization at scale: With the FDC, the faster time-to-decisions enables business users to monetize the value of data. Prior to the advent of the FDC, whether monetization was truly achieved was debatable, given the timeframes required to extract insights.
- Unleashing curiosity: As more and more experiments come to life about curiosity, one thing is certain: Decision Intelligence solutions like the FDC can boost natural business-related curiosity and ingenuity. In fact, our patented anomaly detection engine, “Nudges,” constantly identifies anomalous trends for business users prompting them to investigate and explore on their own with confidence.
This blog post is part one in a 2-part series. In the next post, we will explore a checklist of what to consider when looking at Decision Intelligence solutions and products.
Want to learn more about the FDC? Contact us today!
