Collaborative Decision-Making

BTM Works 360 connects business and technology communities – and their information, knowledge and analytics – within a workbench environment that creates the context and provides the means for collaborative decision-making. This can be achieved by removing communication impediments, providing techniques for structuring decision analysis, and systematically directing the pattern, timing, or content of the related dialogs.

Collaboration may be either horizontal or vertical – the direction is less important than the richness and completeness of the decision environment. The four dimensions of the BTM Framework (Process, Organization, Information and Technology) serve as coordinates for BTM Works 360 to transcend community borders and discover, connect, and coordinate the disparate elements necessary for effective collaborative decision-making.

Factual knowledge is not sufficient for making complex business technology decisions. Every member of a collaborative decision-making team brings his or her unique personal history, experience, value judgments, and perspective – indeed, such individual diversity is the source of creativity and innovation that is the lifeblood of organizational excellence and value. BTM Works 360 provides individual decision team members with a role-based workbench to develop, share and defend their positions and collective decisions. The BTM Works 360 workbench is designed around and implements the following collaborative decision support principles:

• Structured Information and Analytics: provide quantitative information through metrics, scorecards and management dashboards for managing aspects of business technology such as investments, performance, risks, resources, and assets.
  
  
• Models: define visual models describing the concepts and relationships that comprise business and technology systems and operations.
  
  
• Knowledge: provide specialized problem-solving expertise stored as facts, rules, procedures, or management capabilities.
  
  
• Communications: support collaboration for decision-making, shared tasks; and executive conversations, including innovation, agility, and strategy execution.
  
  
• Unstructured Information: manage, retrieve and manipulate documents in a variety of electronic formats.

Collaborative decision-making, and BTM Works 360, provide a range of important and valuable benefits that allow executives and business technology managers to find – and drive – new sources of value in their organizations:

• Identify new opportunities for business innovation that come from technology
  
  
• Business and technology speak the same language by assembling common information, decisions, and performance measures
  
  
• Unify services across functional units by highlighting the value and use of standards
  
  
• Mitigate risk through transparency, tracking and monitoring underlying risk factors
  
  
• Do more with less by leveraging reusable assets and knowledge