Decision Support Tool

Decision support is one of the two building blocks in enterprise architecture. Leaders, and enterprise stakeholders, particularly those with funding interests, and investors require insight into their enterprise to make sound decisions based on simple business drivers without needing to answer to the automation infrastructure, or being tethered to complicated technology. Decisions derived here range from strategic growth decisions to the mundane decisions required to procure and implement information technology (IT) systems for efficiency or savings.

It is the IT area where most organizations focus EA often to the neglect of the rest of the enterprise.
 

Caption: Decision support and governance are the two building blocks required to develop and implement a meaningful enterprise architecture.

The value of a decision support tool that creates visibility from real intelligence is the heart of the enterprise architecture. In fact, entire corporations and sovereign nations spend billions of dollars to gain visibility for decision support.

There are data mining industries with data warehouses and data marts whose sole purpose is to provide meaningful data to make informed decisions. However, the information synthesized through these tools often fails to provide the intelligence necessary for sound business decisions. Without this intelligence, business decisions are based on speculation at best or misinformation at worst.

The physical representation of the decision support tool could be a document, a software model mapped to business process and strategy, an electronic repository, or the combination of the above. Today electronic repositories are in vogue, but It is not so much the media form that is important: it is the content and usability of the tool from the decision maker’s perspective that matters. In other words, if an enterprise architecture is not immediately usable by enterprise leaders it is not an enterprise architecture.   

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