Our recent 2022 survey found that, among APAC data and analytics decision-makers, only 13% indicated that their enterprise has advanced insights-driven business maturity — that is, they use a decide-act-learn-improve loop to ensure that insights are having maximum business impact. Among these data and analytics decision-makers, 23% expected their organization to use decisioning platforms to facilitate digital decisions in 2022. Today, many APAC enterprises embed digital decisions into their business context by building digital decisioning solutions.

Forrester defines digital decisioning solutions as the software solutions that use digital decisioning platforms or custom-built rule engines to author decision logic; use decision intelligence technologies such as machine learning; use digital decisions in vertical or horizontal use cases; and manage the full decision logic lifecycle, including feedback loops, to continuously improve decision logic. As enterprises’ insights-driven maturity increases, digital decisioning solutions will help them:

  • Drive operational excellence. Authoring new business logic requires firms to rethink and standardize software decision logic to deliver stable, optimized decision results. Converting manual decisions into digital solutions improves accuracy and performance for large volumes of stable business requests. Combining rule-based logic with algorithms from operational research and AI gives firms more ways to improve operations.
  • Improve business performance with adaptivity. Changing hard-coded rules requires IT support, which is inefficient and expensive. Digital decisioning solutions enable business experts to easily modify rules and better reflect the rapidly changing context so that their companies can respond faster to market changes with operational flexibility.

In our latest report, we have listed recent innovative use cases of digital decisioning in financial services, retail, manufacturing, and logistics and transportation, powered by solutions from a diverse landscape of technology vendors (see figure). Technology and business leaders should use this report to understand how to combine the best of human decision logic with the best of AI to improve their operations.

 

Whether you are just starting your digital decisioning solutions journey or you are expanding the solutions to more departments, to make your projects successful, enterprises at both stages of adoption should:

  • Prioritize valuable use cases that can be quickly implemented. Scope an initial production environment for experimenting. A solution may not deliver the expected results immediately; it requires an environment to iterate for better performance. Firms with adequate data should start with valuable use cases that may lead to convincing business cases.
  • Demonstrate business value to drive usage. Companies can face resistance when requiring employees to adopt new technologies. Top-down support from executives and managers is necessary, but the project team also needs to help employees see the value.
  • Develop functional support for effective management. Decision logics are only one part of an overall solution. Enterprises may need to develop governance functions or automation workflows to support management initiatives.

If you want to learn more about APAC digital decisioning solutions and best practices, Forrester clients can access the full report or schedule a guidance session or an inquiry.