Introduction To Decision Modelling | BusinessAnalystMentor.com

Decision modelling is the process of creating a structured and, typically, visual representation of how the decisions are made within an organisation. 

By using this technique, it’s possible to break down complex decision-making processes into understandable and, perhaps more importantly, manageable components. 

Decision models created through this process serve as visual aids helping all involved stakeholders, including analysts and key decision-makers, to comprehend all the important factors, business rules, and considerations that impact choices within an organisation. 

As it helps capture the logic behind these choices, decision modelling improves transparency, consistency, and collaboration in the decision-making, and helps automate the entire process.

Within any organisation, there are dozens of critical decisions made on a daily basis. Most of these decisions need to be made quickly and accurately, as they will often determine how profitable a certain business operation will be and contribute to its overall success. 

Decision modelling serves as a tool that can help organisations forecast the potential possibilities brought by particular actions. Plus, the visual nature of this approach makes it much easier to understand how organisational knowledge and data are merged to make a specific business decision.

As a business analysis technique, decision modelling is used for the representation of the process of making both simple and complex decisions. 

Decisions that are simpler and more straightforward are typically represented by a single decision table or tree to show how a set of business rules established in the organisation work on a set of relevant data to produce a decision. 

When it comes to more complex decisions, decision modelling helps break them into a number of simpler, individual components (decisions), depicting how those smaller parts combine to create a more elaborate and detailed decision. 

This is possible because decision models can decompose any information needed to make even the simplest decision and describe that sub-decision in terms of business rules (both definitional and behavioural) that lead to it being made.