Decision-maker workshops

Who is the decision-maker?

The development of decision analysis systems requires an initial identification of who the decision-makers in an organization are. A decision-maker in the context of decision analysis is the person (or persons) with the appropriate authority to take a decision and commit the necessary resources to carrying out the activities required to implement a decision. Sometimes these roles are split between managers and financial directors in which case the decision analysis has an important role in enhancing the communication of decision justifications.

Decision-maker workshops are designed to obtain critical information on decision-maker objectives, to identify the main components of the decision-making environment and to determine their time and risk preferences. The critical factors over which the decision-maker has some influence as well as those over which no influence can be asserted will be identified. In the case of exogenous non-controllable factors the assessment of risk can lead eventually to the identificationof ways and means of mitigating or reducing that risk in the specific case of the activities over which the decision-makers controls. The relationship between information quality and knowledge of the citical relationships within a domain has a direct influence upon the degree to which time and risk preferences match reality. The DAI will organize and facilitate decision-maker workshops as the starting point for the development of demonstrations.

Computational logic workshops

Computational logic workshops will involve the development of the decision analysis model design. If the demonstration sponsor has programming staff these workshops will be designed to transfer appropriate techniques to these individuals within the context of the decision analysis issue already established by the decision-maker workshop. Where necessary training sessions on server end programming/scripting techniques will be provided together with training in server setup and management and scripting-to-server-end-operation implementation cycles.

Use will be made of critical functional analysis (CFA) in order to maximise the efficiency of the design process.

Where the sponsor has no IT staff this work will be undertaken by qualified personnel, under the management of the DAI, and who will submit an overall operational proposal to the decision-makers/s.

Program implementation

Once the output from the compoutational coding workshops is reviewed by the decision-makers and given the "go-ahead" the decision analysis system is coded and set up. The output of this activity is a functioning prototype decision analysis system. The term "prototype" refers to the fact that the decision-maker/s have not seen the final product in operation and are therefore not is a position to have passed judgement on the system's operational transparency, ease of use and utility of output.

During implementation significant segments of the system will be demonstrated to the decision-makers based upon the Internet System Prototyping Service concept. The system will, however, be a fully functional system operating in compliance with all Internet, World Wide Web, HTML, ECMA and other relevant standards. However the coding system used enables reconfigurations to be undertaken to adjust to user requirements with extremely short turn-around cycles.

Assessment

Assessment is a process of evaluation of the utility of the operational system in terms of the original management decision analysis objectives. This will include convenience of use, efficiency, costs of opration and the likely cost savings in terms of operations. This will also include assessments of the likely savings resulting from the use of the system in securing decisions which improve the performance of the organization.

Notes

The whole design and implementation cycle is subject to a real time audit (RTA) enabling sponsors to check at any time the status of the development of their sponsored demonstration. A more comlete description of RTA is under preparation and will be provided in due course. More details are available on the George Boole Foundation website.

At all stages there is a live feedback mechanism whereby downstream observations which suggest refinement or alterations in the design are transmitted back to the team responsible for the necessary work.