Although not always possible, wherever practical, an automation initiative with objectively measurable business outcomes and strong subjective metrics are preferred. Prioritize decision automation initiatives that:

• Align with strategic objectives
• Are objectively measurable

Having clear-cut success metrics where capital investment needs to be considered against other priorities helps justify future business cases and demonstrates value to build momentum. Also, and more critical, you want first to understand what the business priorities are, overall, what are the current strategic themes? Will the selected business case help to achieve the stated strategic objectives?

In business, there are always many areas that can be improved. Prioritizing, in terms of strategic impact, is important. If your business is switching from wholesale to consumer direct, for instance, you may not want to be investing to make the wholesale model more efficient.

When it comes to decision automation, some or all of the following should be true.

• A reasonable transaction volume – you have to make the decision at scale
• Many SME’s working a task, making it hard to scale up quickly
• Business owners who are frustrated with the pace of change

operational transaction volume

Although each transaction’s dollar value may be small for repetitive transactions, high volume transactions can add up to be of dominant financial importance in business. These are usually a good target for decision automation.

In contrast, complex strategic or tactical decisions that are seldom made don’t make for good automation candidates. Decision support systems that combine subject matter expert knowledge with ad hoc insights from analytics can better address these.

High variability of interpretation

Complex decisions made by subject matter experts can often result in different outcomes based on who is making the decision. This creates business risk and these areas are also hard to scale as it takes time to train staff. Automation of these decisions will allow for better scalability and more consistent decision making.

Frustration at the pace of change

A key benefit of decision automation is to allow the decision-making criteria to be quickly and safely changed – what you might call safe agility. For business owners frustrated at how long it takes to adapt systems and manual processes to new regulations, policies or business opportunities, decision automation offers real business value.