One of my students at UCI pointed me to this great Seth Godin post:
Don’t measure anything unless the data helps you make a better decision or change your actions.
If you’re not prepared to change your diet or your workouts, don’t get on the scale.
Seth’s always worth listening too (I regularly quote his blow up your home page comment for instance). I really liked this one because to me it identifies one of the critical benefits of Decision Management: By explicitly identifying (and managing) the decisions you make as an organization, you can see what you have to change to “move the dial”. In fact we regularly begin our analysis with a client by mapping their key performance indicators (KPIs) or metrics to decisions – especially day-to-day, operational decisions. Realizing that improvement in those metrics requires better front-line decision making builds executive awareness of the power of analytics while also providing a business justification for rules and analytics projects. After all we are proposing to model and automate this decision because doing so will mean it gets made better and now we can identify the corporate (or divisional or departmental) metric that will improve as a result.
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