Choice Dynamics: 5 Benefits of Decision Support Systems for Enterprises in 2024

Informed decision-making is a crucial process for any business to thrive.

But that’s where a lot of companies struggle. To make good decisions, you must get your hands on quality data. You must have decision-makers who excel at this craft. But that still doesn’t guarantee you a good outcome.

McKinsey Global Survey shows that only 20 percent of employers implied that their company is skillful at decision-making. However, the majority reported that much of the time they devote to decision-making is used ineffectively.

If that’s also the case with you, then you must implement decision support systems in your business. These software solutions use data to make more informed decisions on behalf of you.

That’s why you should consider them due to how they can change the whole decision-making process in your company.

In this article, we’ll discuss five decision support system benefits for enterprises in 2024 that will shift your decision-making process so you can reach your goals easily.

Let’s get started.

1. Efficient Decision Workflow

Like any other operation, decision-making also contains a specific workflow.

The first thing you need to come up with is the end goal. Then, you need to gather all the necessary information, such as employee performance, company data, and competitor strategies, among others.

Meanwhile, you need to navigate through alternative solutions to find the best approach. Then comes the execution step, in which you make the decision. Lastly, you measure the results of your decision.

As you can understand, it’s not as easy as it may seem. You must go through this process every time you want to make informed decisions.

However, you can make it more efficient by leveraging decision support systems.

These tools have many features you can use to complete some of the tasks of your decision-making process.

A Gartner study shows that, by 2023, more than 33% of large enterprises will make analysts practice decision intelligence, including decision modeling.

With decision intelligence, you have a framework in place that will inevitably make your decision workflow more efficient.

For example, if you feed all the necessary information to the system, it will evaluate the pros and cons of each decision and provide you with the best one.

This saves you from the indecision of choosing which decision to implement.

Qstory, a customer service automation company based in the United Kingdom, wanted to rapidly prototype an expert system for their product.

They used VisiRule to easily and intuitively create logic charts even as non programmers. Soon, Qstory had a working expert system they could test their logic on, saving them tons of time and money.

2. Easier Prioritization in Decision-Making

When it comes to making decisions, you must get your priorities right.

Imagine this. As an owner of a large company, you probably need to make hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions. These decisions are directly related to your business success.

However, not all decisions will have the same impact.

So, how do you decide which project to begin first? Which tasks to delegate? Which clients to put on the waiting list?

Without prioritizing the right decision, you can hurt your business by losing resources and time.

What’s alarming is that McKinsey found that among company executives, only 52 percent spent their time matching their organization’s priorities.

When you have a decision support system in place, then you can input your metrics and company data into it. The tool will analyze your situation and offer you the correct priorities when making important decisions.

This will allow you to easily understand how you should schedule your tasks and how much impact each of your decisions can have on your business.

Prioritization in decision-making is important not only for enterprises but also for other industries, including healthcare, manufacturing, and governance.

When you have the right tool, you’ll be able to set the right priorities that bring the best results overall.

The Ministry of Health in New Zealand was having problems prioritizing patients due to their limited resources.

They used 1000minds’ Clinical Priority Access Criteria (CPAC) to make evidence-based and fair patient prioritization decisions. This helped them confidently choose which patient to treat first.

3. Automating Decision Processes

Decision fatigue is real.

The more decisions you need to make, the greater chance you have of making errors in your decisions.

When you’re making so many decisions by yourself, you’re bound to make mistakes. That’s not entirely your fault. Making informed decisions is a difficult task.

Research shows that every day, an average adult makes about 200 decisions on food alone. So imagine how many decisions we make daily in total.

Of course, not all of them are equally important. But think about the decisions that can make or break your business.

With so many things going on in your company, making high-quality decisions can prove to be daunting, given information overload and complex choices.

And that’s where decision support system automation technology comes in. It helps you take some load off of your shoulders.

With these tools, you can automate some of the decision-making processes and repetitive tasks. Usually, these systems have rule-based decision intelligence engines.

When you delegate your operational decisions to decision support software, you can put more time and effort into decisions that have a bigger effect on your business’s success.

This makes you more productive, reduces risks, and maintains consistency throughout the decision process. Without such tools, you wouldn’t be able to achieve the same results from individuals or groups that make decisions.

Shift4, an American payment processing company, was restricted to manual decision processing regarding their backend applications. It was hindering their scalability.

They then chose the Decisions business automation tool to automate some of these manual processes. It helped them provide their customers with self-service capability.

4. Improved Decision Accuracy

When making decisions, a lot of folks ignore an important aspect—accuracy.

Decision accuracy isn’t something that you can easily measure, not until you put it to work and then see the results. But in that case, it’s too late for you to undo the damage due to an inaccurate decision.

Moreover, humans are more emotional creatures than logical. Research shows that emotion has more impact on our decisions than logic, so much so that it’s impossible to make decisions without some emotion attached.

It’s only natural that your human abilities will be limited when making decisions. That’s why many of your decisions won’t be correct.

Decision support systems don’t have any emotions. In addition, machines have more accuracy than humans when it comes to analysis, calculations, and predictions.

The reason lies in the fact that machines work with data, rules, and company history. By removing the emotional bias, you can make more informed decisions based on real data and evidence.

Another decision support system benefit is that you can calculate the decision accuracy prior to implementing it. This allows you to discard any decision that gives a low score and choose the ones that give the highest.

That way, you can save yourself from many headaches and resource loss.

Buckman, a global chemical company, had a relatively flat operating profit. They couldn’t decide how to eliminate non-value-added activities.

They used Minitab’s statistical tools to train their sales associates in data analysis. They leveraged many useful features like a decision tree to understand many mystified concepts they previously didn’t get.

5. Better Collaboration

For many enterprises, decision-making is rather a group work.

Every team member on a decision panel is not likely from the same department of the company. Many times, a collaborator or two may lag behind when it comes to the different data that drives a decision.

This means either everyone doesn’t have an equal say in the decision, or the team needs to move forward without them.

As weird as it may seem, some things you may believe about collaborating in decision-making are not true. For example, a smaller decision-making group is more likely to make the right choice than a large one, according to a Princeton University research.

But decision support systems change that scenario.

Many of these tools have integrated communication systems where you can collaborate with other team members when making decisions. You can share data, feedback, and opinions efficiently.

Such systems ensure every stakeholder is on the same page and can have an equal voice in important decisions.

Moreover, some of these tools have project management features included. Decision-makers can thus work on a project at the same time. Without these tools, team members wouldn’t be able to collaborate so easily.

This improves the overall efficiency of the decision-making process and results in a well-rounded decision.

Vulk, a Texas-based web design shop, didn’t know how to shorten their meeting time. They used a Roberts Rule system for meetings, which would drag each session for hours.

After that, they decided to use Loomio. This co-op software helped them make quicker decisions in meetings and collaborate effectively. They were able to reduce their meeting time to only 30 minutes.

Conclusion

A good decision has the power to transform your whole organization.

But as we’ve discussed before, decision-making is not an easy process. Fortunately, technology has changed that landscape by leaps and bounds.

By now, you should have a good grasp of decision support system benefits. What’s surprising is that due to neglecting these tools, so many organizations are suffering from modern-time decision-making.

A Gartner survey reveals that 65% of business decisions made are more complex now than they were two years ago. The reasons include having more stakeholders and the decision-making process and being open to more choices.

As time goes on, it will only become more complex. So, what you need to do is deploy a decision support system like VisiRule and start reaping the benefits right away.

It will help you make data-driven, evidence-based decisions that you are confident in.

Also published here.