Helping People Make Better Operational Decisions

Together with our CTO, I’ve spent a lot of time over the past year or two thinking about how people make operational decisions and what capabilities would enhance their decision making process.  A large aspect of operational decision making involves a continuous improvement cycle.

To make a change to improve operational performance, a person needs the following:

• notification when there is a deviation from the target or desired performance;
• contextual information and explanation regarding the performance issue;
• the ability to drill into the issue to obtain more detail and isolate the issue;
• the ability to collaborate with others to obtain additional understanding of the issue;
• additional information to understand the characteristics of the issue such as when and over what period of time did it happen, is it an abnormality or a systemic issue etc;
• help to determine the most appropriate corrective action, which might come from the ability to perform multiple what-if analyses.

This decision cycle is shown below:

To be useful the above capabilities must be:
- easy to use;
- the information easy to understand and consume; and
- the delivery of the information and scenarios must be responsive enough to fit in with the person’s decision making cycle and time constraints. 

The capabilities also have to deliver real value and not just look good in a flashy demonstration.  For example specifying a scenario analysis should allow for a multiple independent changes to made to one or more data points, metrics and dimensional members with the result being the compound effect of those changes.  Rarely can a performance issue be resolved by making a single change.  Nor does applying a simple change such as a 10% uplift in production for all days in the period offer much meaningful value, even though it might look good in a demonstration.

As we’ve thought through this, we believe the Holy Grail is combining sophisticated, meaningful functionality with the ease of use that encourages adoption and ongoing usage.  We are about to launch Version 3 of myDIALS, which is a major step forward for us and continues our journey towards this goal with the addition of “every-person analytics”.  I’m excited about the launch and the very positive feedback we have received thus far.  I’m also looking forward to delivering a lot more capability to help people optimize operational performance as we execute against our plans in the next 12 months or so.