Decision Engineering - Notes

Notes

• Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) is a closely related discipline that focuses on automating decisions across an enterprise. Decision engineering is from this point of view a superset of EDM, since it encompasses both manual and automated decision making processes, unifying them into a common methodology that, when effective, breaks down barriers between quantitative analysis / analytics tools and departments and those with a more qualitative / strategic / management focus.
• The term "decision engineering" is used in several industries with more specific meaning than the framework described here. For instance, the Australian Software Research Centre has an IT evaluation approach called Decision Engineering; Idea focuses on emergency management under the heading of "Decision Engineering Analysis"; and the National University of Singapore includes an organization called the Biomedical Decision Engineering Group. Each of these has a meaning that is distinct from what is discussed in the present article.
• In behavioral economics, "decision engineering" can mean the deliberate manipulation of consumer choices, as in this Journal of Consumer Research study: People choose healthy meals, if given more choice: Study. In this use of the term, decision engineering is roughly analogous to soft paternalism - a quite different meaning than is covered in the present article, referring as it does to the engineering of decisions made by consumers, rather than the use of engineering principles to aid in complex decision making. Although distinctly different, this practice draws on much of the same decision-making research as does decision engineering (such as, for the example, the work of Richard Thaler as described in this article about Barack Obama's University of Chicago connections to this school of thought).
• Cost engineering measures the costs of engineering projects. Cost engineering is sometimes grouped into product engineering and design optimization as "decision engineering". This can be distinguished from the broader framework of this article, which goes beyond the arena of engineering decisions to all decisions faced by organizations.
• Operations research is a largely quantitative approach to decision making that attempts to identify optimal or near-optimal solutions to decision making problems.