The age of decision-making platforms

Blog: Professional advantage - BPM blog

Decision-making processes are key to your success. They direct resources, mitigate risk and exploit opportunity. Given the nature of business, decisions are both transient and fixed. Formal processes require evaluation and approval, e.g. budgets or Demand Reviews, others respond to a changing horizon. All processes need agility and flexibility. All processes need knowledge, collaboration, assumptions, and context. They need optimal latency and they need to be on an appropriate level and scale. Decisions make or break a business.

A risk of the traditional approach to decision support, is that a huge amount of data sits outside a well architected digital record, either not considered or in unstructured fragmented emails and documents. Assumptions are not transparent; decisions often don’t have valid supporting data, and the too and thro of the collaboration that supports the reason “why” is lost amongst supposition and myth. Many organisations spend time examining the reasons “why” and repeating poor decisions in a perpetual loop.

Most applications can’t cater for modern decision support. They hold the version, the outcome (not the story) and the how and why. Surely a business needs to learn and apply its need to think of its tools, people and processes as one single cognitive process.

Few technologies are addressing this. BOARD stands out as leading the charge. It defines itself as not a BI product or a budgeting product, but as a decision-making platform. Its aim is to create disruptive business advantages for organisations. BOARD International CTO, Pietro Ferrari, described this focus as “a platform with cognitive technologies that mimic human understanding and thought processes to drastically improve the way people interact with data, making it natural and easy, like an interaction amongst humans. On a single platform and architecture, we are bridging the domains of cognitive computing with business intelligence, planning, simulation and predictive analytics, to revolutionise how business decisions can be made.”

The latest BOARD version underlines this focus and includes the following features:

Search Generated Analytics

This new function enables users to perform analyses without even needing to lay a finger on the keyboard. Business users with zero technical knowledge can simply interrogate BOARD verbally and get back a machine-generated report that is automatically integrated with vocal and written narratives. The same results are achievable by typing in a question; BOARD will automatically create a pertinent report and return all the most relevant results amongst existing reports.

Story Telling

This new functionality allows users to create a personalised version of enterprise reports and save them in the form of a live presentation. The live presentation can be saved into a personal workspace or shared with individuals and workgroups, creating a virtual community working together in real-time on the same reports.

In-Context Collaboration

BOARD 10.1 strongly enhances collaboration across decision-making processes by introducing the ability for multiple users to work together in real-time on the same analysis and contextually communicate through an embedded chat.

Automated Narration

At a user’s request, BOARD 10.1 automatically generates smart descriptions of analyses and reports to highlight what is most important and interesting, both in the form of text and voice.

Cutting-Edge User Experience

BOARD 10.1 introduces a totally redesigned drag and drop UI that drastically improves the interaction with data and minimises the learning curve for business users, allowing them to easily and effectively create their own personal views of enterprise reports.

Contact our Board Planning Team to discuss opportunities to improve your decision-making processes.

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