Leadership, Strategy and Decision Support Systems

Talking about strategy and leadership without proper set of systems, methods and procedures is like talking about driving and not actually sitting in car and driving. Decision Support Systems (DSS) supplies management and strategy with beneficial information and strongly supports made decisions. It is vital to test new strategy or decision within business environment. This is the reason why DSS operationally supports company leaders and strategy.

Testing strategic decisions is part of planning and simulations or within business cases. If DSS is not properly set and delivers doubtful data because data definition processes are not installed, leaders, management and strategy will work with non trustable data. “We do not know how many customers we have,” or “how many products are still active”.
With more and more complex processes, organizations and products it is getting harder and harder to report. What used to be simple to report and to base business decision upon nowadays is very hard. Many streams influences modify key performance indicator definition and there are many KPIs that are seem very similar but are quite different and reflect different processes and products.
Creating DSS without data quality and data definition processes is like building house on sand. First flood will destroy house.
It is a hard work to establish good definition quality processes but it is also absolutely necessary without alternative solution.

“I’ve never seen nice house basis. There were always mood, cement and noise.”
Bill Innmon

To conclude, talking about leadership and strategy without implementation through scenarios is like building sandcastle or house with basis in sand. Basis needs to be solid rock and decisions need to be based upon “solid rock” business simulations. Solid rock information basis means hard work as Bill Innmon nicely quoted.

Related posts, articles and documents:

• Scope of Management Functions
• Controlling in Management Functions
• Information System and Decision Making