Council Post: Why Decision Intelligence Is The Next Digital Transformation
Mexis a marketing technology leader, architect and strategist who talks about martech and AI. CTO at KaFe Rocks.
Decision intelligence (DI) is how people make business decisions, regardless of their role or industry. It bridges the gap between analytics-focused data and AI platforms.
The key factor in decision intelligence is its focus on outcomes, emphasizing results, which gives both commercial decision makers and technical teams a space to address actual business issues.
What decision intelligence is not is removing humans from the decision-making process completely. It’s about empowering humans with AI and creating a more holistic, convenient view of all of your business’ data to allow them to make the best decision possible.
- Research shows the more data you have, the better—no matter what decision you are making.
- According to an estimate from Gartner, "By 2023, more than 33% of large organizations will have analysts practicing decision intelligence, including decision modeling."
- IDC predicts that "By 2025, three-fourths of large enterprises will face blind spots due to a lack of intelligent knowledge networks."
In an overarching paradigm shift where data is eating the world, many organizations realize that to remain competitive, meet your customer demands, foster innovation and be responsive to change, you need to thrive to become more data- and AI-driven.
Current decision models are often impractical and unpredictable because of the inability to discover potential disconnections linked with behavioral models in a business environment. Organizations can utilize decision intelligence to improve the decision-making process with the help of machine learning algorithms and AI.
Companies are relentlessly trying to improve the productivity of their day-to-day operations and eliminate bias by using decision intelligence that fosters automation without ignoring the value of human judgment, knowledge and intuition. Decision intelligence is helping businesses accomplish more with less by maximizing data analytics, ML and AI for better decision-making.
Decision intelligence is relatively a new domain that uses smart technology to support, facilitate and automate business decisions. Therefore, introducing this approach requires a strategic approach focused on the clarity and the leverage it brings.
Create a decision intelligence excellence team, with key stakeholders from every department by agreeing on a consensus for the current state and advocating for a new operating model revolving around data and AI.
Bring clarity on how you are going to measure the success of your decisions by focusing on clear outcomes with meaningful impact. Build an implementation roadmap by highlighting the highest impact decisions followed up with a phased implementation plan.
Top management is an important driver that has to ensure various business cases align with day-to-day activities. Be courageous in taking new initiatives, and analyze and iterate frequently. Train your staff and give them the opportunity to be creative in the exploration of new business intelligence models.
I believe we will transform the way we make decisions to become more effective, resilient in volatility and outpace business performance. Decision intelligence will impact many areas of the business—here are few of my favorites:
• Rethinking how we work: Much of today’s work is tedious and unfulfilling, seriously impacting productivity and happiness. We will eventually need to move away from defining people by their jobs and consider reducing boring work thanks to the time freed up by DI. This will help us achieve more purposeful, creative and innovative work.
• Redefining how we think and learn: The thinking and learning ability is about analyzing data, discovering insights, producing predictions and supporting decision-making. Having DI frameworks will combine and unlock the delivery of unique information that helps broaden the scope of automation and end-to-end business processes.
• Reinventing digital marketing: New customer acquisition business models will emerge where we can consolidate our competitive advantage, create high granular customer segments, get ahead of market needs and design customer-centric strategies.
• Repurposing organizations: Embracing decision intelligence will help companies get started with building a data-driven culture, one that has a foundation of technology that enables businesses to synthesize information, learn from it and apply insights at scale. This will create a meritocratic culture that fosters purpose-driven initiatives built for business, all while shortening the decision time frame and driving higher agility and resilience.
Decision-makers need every instrument available in order to help them ask the right questions about their data. Decision intelligence can assist leaders in establishing meaningful, actionable business insights and recommendations.
I believe as data and insights are becoming more and more important, having a helping hand to make smart decisions and provide predictive outcomes will be the next form of digital transformation.
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