What Is Decision Intelligence and How Can Companies Use It?

What Is Decision Intelligence and How Can Companies Use It?

Along with digital transformation, data-driven decision-making (DDDM) has been one of the most prominent business trends in recent years. By basing your important decisions on historical data, you reduce the chances of making errors that are common when relying on intuition alone. 

With the rise of smart technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), decision-making processes are transforming to become more efficient and accurate. Decision Intelligence incorporates AI, Machine Learning (ML), Business Intelligence (BI) and other methods and technologies to supplement and automate corporate decision-making.
 

What Is Decision Intelligence?

Decision Intelligence is a newer system that combines multiple disciplines and technologies to improve business decision-making. After only a few years, it has rapidly become one of the most important technology trends for businesses worldwide.

Decision Intelligence systems use closed-loop learning to continuously learn from previous outcomes. This loop enables the system to retrain and improve itself over time, optimizing future outcomes.

There are three levels of Decision Intelligence:

  1. Support: You can make better business decisions with support from AI-based insights and tools. For example, you might reference a business analytics dashboard to figure out which product component is most cost-effective. 
  2. Augmentation: Your Decision Intelligence system takes a more proactive role by providing data-based recommendations and predictions. A Decision Intelligence system might recommend you buy X units from Vendor Y to maximize savings and productivity.
  3. Automation: The Decision Intelligence system completely automates both decision-making and execution with minimal supervision. It also utilizes a continuous feedback loop to learn from previous decisions and optimize future outcomes. Essentially, the more decisions your system makes, the more it can do to help you reduce costs, improve speed-to-market and grow your organization.

As a company develops trust in its system, it can gradually upgrade toward complete decision-making automation. This system also provides the agility to downgrade in response to abnormal circumstances, where existing data is no longer relevant. Remember that, overall, Decision Intelligence is intended to assist decision-makers by enabling them to make more consistent choices.
 

Why Is Decision Intelligence Important?

Decision Intelligence is quickly becoming critical to a company's survival in the increasingly data- and technology-centric business landscape. For many, Decision Intelligence will be the means for operationalizing AI techniques such as ML and natural language processing (NLP).
 

Decision intelligence is quickly becoming critical. Laptop and pen.


This shift will radically transform operations moving forward, especially when it comes to making business decisions. Companies depend on their decision-makers to lead them to success, but these professionals often find themselves needing to make decisions without enough time or information to truly understand the situation. 

That is the problem Decision Intelligence aims to solve.
 

The Benefits of Decision Intelligence

By implementing Decision Intelligence into your business, you can:

  • Create scalable decision-making: Decision Intelligence enables companies to generate insights from massive amounts of data, allowing you to make more decisions faster at lower costs.
  • Reduce analytics backlog: Decision automation handles tedious and time-consuming analysis tasks, enabling your decision-makers to get more done with less time and effort.
  • Break down internal silos: Decision Intelligence systems bridge the gap between business intelligence and AI, consolidating your data for more consistent insights.
  • Democratize decision-making: Decision support and augmentation make predictive analytics more accessible to commercial decision-makers, empowering them to make decisions once limited to data science experts.
  • Eliminate bias: Regardless of how much data you have, decision-making will always come with some degree of unintentional bias. Decision augmentation helps you identify and understand these biases so you can prevent them from interfering with your business's success. 
 

Is Decision Intelligence the New AI?

AI enables systems to learn from past experiences and adjust to improve outcomes. This is a powerful capability on its own, but Decision Intelligence takes it a step further.

AI and ML are data-focused technologies — although they are capable of generating brilliant insights and adjusting their models accordingly, they cannot take action to execute decisions. 

Similarly, the automated systems responsible for decision execution are exclusively task-focused. While they can automate tasks, they can only fulfill their intended purposes. As a result, their impact on decision effectiveness is limited.

Decision Intelligence combines both data-focused and task-focused technologies to create a holistic system capable of:

  • Producing accurate, data-based insights
  • Using those insights to determine appropriate responses
  • Executing decisions
  • Evaluating outcomes to determine success and support the feedback process
 

BDO Digital's Decision Intelligence Framework

 

At BDO Digital, we take a holistic approach to Decision Intelligence.

We evaluate every area of your digital strategy to make sure it makes sense for your company's specific needs and create solutions that address those needs. 

 
 
  • AI: Embracing AI will be critical for businesses moving forward. With custom ML and NLP solutions and a focus on solving real business problems, we take an approach that allows you to build an AI system tailored to your company's needs. 
  
  • Business alignment and strategy: We determine how well your Decision Intelligence strategy aligns with your overall business goals through business case planning, ROI measurement and Service Level Agreements.
  • Enterprise data: Your decisions are most effective when you have structured, well-organized and easily accessible data to back them up. By moving your data to the cloud, defining data management processes and implementing AI integrations, we enable you to harness your data's full potential.
  • Analytics and insights: We will design and implement analytics technology to provide investigative analysis, profiling, dashboarding and reports so you and your Decision Intelligence system can make use of your data. 
  • Adoption and collaboration: Using the information we gathered at our original consultation, we will develop a streamlined adoption plan for your organization that covers important elements such as workflow management, program governance, communication planning and training.

 
  • Automation: Automating process documentation and workflow integrations streamlines key decision-making processes, enabling you to get more done in less time.
 

As Decision Intelligence becomes more widely used, investing in a comprehensive solution will be a necessity rather than an added benefit. Consult with a provider that knows the digital landscape to create the best system for your company.


BDO Digital can Implement Decision Intelligence in Your Company

 

If you are looking for a way to improve productivity, reduce errors and optimize your decision-making processes, turn to BDO Digital. We will assess your existing digital strategy and present innovative solutions to future-proof your organization. 

Gain peace of mind knowing we are with you every step of the way. Contact us online for more information about augmenting your business decisions with Decision Intelligence.
 

Discover how BDO Digital can enhance your data & AI with Decision Intelligence. Person typing on laptop.