What is Decision Management?
Modern-day business operations are centered around processes and data. However, when knowledge and expertise are forced into hard-coded, inflexible systems, bottlenecks occur. By adopting and scaling the capabilities of business rules, decision modeling, and machine learning, Digital Decisioning leverages data and expertise to create business value, improve results, and deliver a great user experience to effectively meet today’s operational requirements. For Digital Decisioning to deliver true value, it must initially focus on solving business problems that will, ultimately, contribute to positive and desirable business outcomes. Technology, automation, and methodologies are essential for Digital Decisioning, but they are always at the service of business decisions.
The foundation for successful Digital Decisioning projects is applying a Decision Management approach. Decision Management models business decisions first. These decisions, for the most part, have to do with customers and how you engage with them, deliver services to them, or handle their transactions.Once you have a good grasp of what decisions your business needs to make and how these decisions will advance your business, Decision Management shows which technology and analytics tools you need to invest in and how to integrate them. Finally, Decision Management focuses on the processes and infrastructure needed to ensure continuous improvement and business engagement. To maximize success, adopt a proven approach such as the DecisionsFirst™ approach from Decision Management Solutions.
Challenges with clinical guidelines documents such as information overload, varied implementation and difficulty to maintain led this leading healthcare provider to adopt a new approach using decision modeling to develop clinical decision services.
With a decision management approach, the studies and research available could be combined into a single decision model. This could then be used to deploy some standard decision services, available on the enterprise infrastructure, to make decisions whenever and wherever needed.
The organization is a not-for-profit health plan providing a wide range of services, including inpatient, home health, hospitals, hospice, pharmacy, and insurance. 10M+ members, 17,000 doctors and nearly 200,000 total employees.
This project used our standard methodology to:
- Run discovery workshops involving actual business owners – in this case, heart surgeons and heart transplant specialists –to describe the decisions involved and their business context.
- Model and refine decision models in DecisionsFirst Modeler, our decision modeling software. This revealed more granular and reusable decisions as well as the input data and knowledge sources involved.
- Transform decision models into executable decision tables. As the model stabilized, decision tables were added to IBM’s Operational Decision Manager BRMS using the web-based editor and each table was linked to a specific decision in the decision model using our integration between DecisionsFirst Modeler and IBM ODM.
- Deploy an ODM Decision Service that could be called from processes or from a UI such as that used by the Doctors.
The methodology is available from Decision Management Solutions and is configured to fit with an organization’s other approaches based on experience with a decision modeling effort running in parallel.
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