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Introduction
Ready for a mind-blowing reveal on how to make great decisions, whether you’re using your own brain or some supercharged artificial intelligence application? Decision intelligence, a methodology for forming a decision aimed at achieving a specific outcome, is here, and it's on track to change forever how businesses plan for their future.
Everybody would agree that the goal in all decision-making is to reap the best possible outcome. Decision intelligence helps you achieve that goal by requiring that you decide that outcome first and then work backward from there to identify the processes and information you’ll need to make it happen!
Decision intelligence is built on science — several sciences, actually — but some of those scientific formulas can be grasped intuitively. The decision intelligence process is designed to improve your professional performance by a) ensuring that every business decision delivers the best possible outcome, b) pointing you toward innovations that are profitable, c) helping you become an industry mover by becoming a creative disruptor, and d) enabling you to flip failed AI projects into successful endeavors. What's more, decision intelligence can also be used to improve your private life via better decision-making, and you can often do it in your own head or on the back of a napkin or by using a simple table or spreadsheet.
The secret to success in decision intelligence lies in changing how you think about problem-solving and reordering your steps when it comes to the decision-making process. Ask yourself how much money, time, and effort your organization is willing to waste on yet another bad business decision or one more failed AI project, and then ask yourself whether you can afford to ignore a better way to make decisions — especially when you already have on hand much of what you’ll need to take advantage of a decision intelligence approach. It’s not often that you can turn your business around at little or no additional cost to you.
About This Book
The book you’re holding in your hands is a guide primarily for you if you’re a business or finance leader. The book aims to fill you in on decision intelligence, a new framework for making better, more profitable business decisions. It also serves as an introduction for artificial intelligence (AI) and digital decisioning practitioners to take a different approach aimed at making automated decision processes deliver desirable business outcomes. To top it all off, this guide shows you that decision intelligence is not merely a business approach — it’s equally useful when making decisions about your personal life.
This book takes a studied approach to having you reimagine the decision-making, by focusing on a set of discrete tasks you need to accomplish. Here are those tasks, in no particular order:
Flip the data mining model from data first to data last. You start with a decision aimed at the best possible business outcome and end with the data and the processes you need to bring about that outcome in the real world.
Rebalance human and machine roles. Decision intelligence calls for a redirection from a data driven to a decision driven organization. This framework clearly casts humans as decision-makers, where AI acts as sidekick, and where data is relegated to a supporting actor.
Map changes caused by putting the decision first in terms ofBusiness impactProcessesToolsBusiness and Ethical PrinciplesTeams
Learn decision theory and a multidisciplinary approach to decision-making: You learn which steps you must take in order to succeed with decision intelligence, from new perspectives onBusiness impactAI projectsUpstream and downstream decisioningDisruptive innovationJob roles
This book answers your questions about what decision intelligence is, which conditions must be created at your company in order for it to succeed, how you can plan a project, and how to implement it successfully. I've also made an effort to ensure that this book can be used in myriad ways and by anyone, from individuals to powerful leaders of huge organizations. As such, it offers these benefits:
An overview of the steps involved in putting the decision before the data in the decision-making process
A guidebook with practical suggestions for the various options, overall flexibility, and choices of implementations of a decision intelligence strategy
A reference book divided into parts, chapters, and sections so that you can quickly find the content you’re looking for when you need it
This book — designed so that you can swiftly get a grasp on everything — features many examples, instructions, checklists, illustrations, and tables. It’s also structured systematically according to the decision intelligence framework and its many moving parts.
Conventions Used in This Book
This book doesn’t have many rules. The entire book is structured so that you can quickly find everything you need and get a grasp on the content. The detailed table of contents helps you jump right to the information you need, and each chapter begins with a brief and succinct description of the chapter's main topics. Whenever topics overlap or other chapters are mentioned, cross-references help you conveniently jump back-and-forth between the chapters. If you’re interested in a particular term, you can look it up in the index.
Foolish Assumptions
This book is not (only) for decision-makers in business or finance. Decision intelligence is too crucial for improving business outcomes to be contained only to the C-suite and data scientist levels. In organizations that practice or seek data- and AI-democratization, decision intelligence should be practiced at every level of decision-making throughout the organization, even at the microdecision and mundane-decision levels. Whether you work at a company, an educational institution, a research institute, a public agency, or a nonprofit organization, you can benefit from the decision-driven approach that is at the heart of decision intelligence. Whether you have an education in the technical, economic, management science, or social science fields, this creative approach gives you new ideas on how to use what you know (and what you have to decide) more productively.
On an individual level, the following assumptions are made in this book about readers who will most likely gain the most from the information in this book:
You’re in charge of an organization or department and you want to be decision driven instead of data driven so that every decision is productive and profitable.
You’re trying to accelerate your career plans and you want to shine by making important decisions so that the best possible outcome is realized.
You are applying, or you are planning to apply, AI or machine learning at your organization, and you need to know how to make projects succeed in terms of measurable business impacts.
Your
