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03.06.09
How Microdecisions Impact Your Customer Base
 By James Taylor
Tom Davenport had a post today on Microdecisions for Macro Impact that pointed out on the key benefits of decision management, with its focus on operational decisions:
If you can identify a few key microdecisions that can be addressed and improved, you can often dramatically improve performance.
"Micro decisions" is a phrase Neil and I used in Smart (Enough) Systems and refers to the decisions made transaction by transaction, customer by customer. Companies often fail to recognize these as individual decisions, instead lumping them into bigger ones. For instance, instead of realizing that each price offered to each customer is a micro decision they think that "pricing" is a big, strategic decision. Failing to consider these micro decisions as separate decision making opportunities means you cannot personalize or target them to individual customers. This in turn means you cannot leverage all that lovely data you have about customers or reward loyalty or….
Even if you don't want to completely automate a micro decision, you should probably think about using decision management to reduce the range of options available to a human decision maker or at least rank the available options by likely effectiveness. A decision service can automate a micro decision but it can also provide support for a micro decision in this way.
Like Tom I think it is important to match these decisions to objectives and to measure them so they can be improved over time. I also liked his point about checklists and I was sure I had blogged about checklists and decision management before but apparently not so i will do so tomorrow. I have blogged about micro decisions before though.
Anyway, decision management and micro decisions - a great way to get a macro impact.
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About the Author:
VP of Product Marketing with a passion for the technologies of decision automation. 15 years designing, developing, releasing and marketing advanced enterprise software platforms and development tools. Across the board experience in software development, engineering and product management and product marketing.
http://www.edmblog.com
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