This is the first of several notes which will introduce concepts necessary to design and do decision governance. The aim is to develop a more precise idea of what decision governance is, how it works, and what it means to design it and evaluate its benefits and costs. The focus in this first note is…
There are three ways to think about how much decision governance to do. I will call them The “overall value” approach consists of comparing an estimate of benefits of all decision governance in place, with the costs of complying with it. Benefits include: Both of the above can be attributed to decision governance only if…
How can you tell if there is a need to do anything to influence how decisions are made, that is, to govern decisions? If any of the following apply, then it is worth investing effort to improve how decisions are made.
A decision is a commitment to a course of action. There is no way to see commitment, which is a problem if you want to spot decisions. Instead, you can see actions people take, and infer from that what they may have committed to – note that you are inferring what they may think or…
The corporate function or group will usually have in its scope to decide how decision governance works in a firm. Key design decisions they will make involve who can design how decisions are made, how they can do so, including how to handle changes to, exceptions, and incidents related to how decisions are made. When…
Decision governance consists of defining how decisions should be made, and auditing that the processes for doing so are in fact applied. While it often seems like decisions are simply made, and there isn’t much to govern, this is incorrect. It is possible to completely change how to think about decisions, in particular in terms…
Decision governance puts constraints on how decisions are made: e.g., assess impacts of decision options before picking one, estimate probabilities of outcomes of options, elicit preferences of decision makers, and so on. In other words, explain the reasons for a decision before deciding. If these constraints are a source of competitive advantage, then this means…
In the context of human decision making, a decision is a commitment to a course of action (see the note here); it involves mental states that lead to specific actions. An AI system, as long as it is a combination of statistical learning algorithms and/or logic, and data, cannot have mental states in the same…
It has been successfully argued in research on organizations that a decision is an abstraction [1], if it is defined as a commitment to a course of action. If I say that I decided to go skiing tomorrow, is this abstract or concrete? The only thing you can observe will be my behavior and the…