You might have a banking app on your phone. Your accounts are accessible in real-time, from any smart device. You can check balances, transfer funds and it’s all digitized for your hand-held convenience, anytime. Is this digital decisioning? No.
Your CRM has a sophisticated dashboard with detailed customer metrics, maybe even a few predictive insights useful for marketing and sales programs. It also integrates market intelligence for automated performance benchmarking. Is this digital decisioning? Once again, no.
It’s easy to confuse digitization—be it a sleek app design or automated business intelligence—with digital decisioning. Both play a role in the larger concept of digital transformation, but the difference is digital decisioning is at its center. Think of decisioning as the brain and central nervous system of your business. It provides you not only intelligence but also the ability to coordinate your entire body to move and respond to the world around you. Together this creates a feedback loop that enables you to continuously learn and adapt.
Digital decisioning is active, anticipatory. It moves you to act—to take the next step before you know that step exists—by showing you the bigger picture of your business, your products, your customers. With digital decisioning, split-second actions are continuously optimized for the best outcomes. Holistic, 360-degree customer views are powered by a tailored, ever-expanding data feed from multiple sources and the ability to seamlessly share “decision assets” across the company. Think: data characteristics, customer profiles, predictive analytics powered by machine learning, decision models and more.
In essence, digital decisioning enables radical, customer-focused change because it gives you two things: clear visibility into and across your business and the power to act on that insight.
In this Forbes article, The Anatomy of a Digital Decision, I talk more about the digital revolution and why digital decisioning is at the center of it all.
