Decision management is the combination of machine learning with business rules to help organizations understand the appropriate actions to take in a process. Typically, companies use decision management as part of a larger business automation approach for business operations.
After defining which processes to automate, the organization creates workflows that outline the process. When a decision about what action to take next in the workflow arises, you can create a decision model to help determine what happens next.
The hallmark of decision management is that software makes the decision instead of a human. So, decision management effectively mimics the human decision-making process through decision modeling for digital tasks, especially those with clear guidelines for the job. By using decision management, you can combine multiple decisions together with automated tasks to create an end-to-end automated business process.
For example, if you’re automating the onboarding process for new hires, one step is setting up access to IT resources. However, the process is different depending on whether the position is on-site, remote or hybrid. You can use decision management to access employee records that can help determine an individual’s IT needs without human intervention. The software then launches the appropriate workflow based on the individual’s IT needs, such as provisioning the required network access, sending emails to employees and their manager, shipping physical equipment to employees’ home addresses or setting up a work ticket for the equipment to be delivered to their on-site workstations.
Using decision management for digital decisioning enables you to collect data from a wide range of sources in near real-time, which is typically not possible when humans perform the tasks. For example, the system can use multi-party content services, intelligent information extraction, first-party data and third-party consumer data.
