A different sort of decision support.

Tuesday 27th April 2004

Normally when I think of decision support, my impression is of a rather old-fashioned expression that we used to use to describe business intelligence and similar functionality. However, Krysalis provides decision support software of a totally different ilk.

Krysalis' products are based on what is known as multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), which was originally developed in various research projects in the United States and, in the UK, at the London School of Economics.

MCDA consists of a set of techniques designed to support group decision-making. That is, when a group of executives or other relevant parties sit around a table and come to a collective decision on their priorities and spending plans. Now, we are all familiar with that sort of process. MCDA aims to make it more efficient. Moreover, it can prove that it does.

The process of using MCDA is pretty much the same exercise that you would go through if you were making decisions in an entirely natural manner. That is, you determine all the criteria that are relevant, assess how each option scores against those criteria, weight the criteria, and so on. And then you make your decision. Research indicates that if you simply do this on paper and then make your judgement then, on average, you will be 25% away from the optimal solution that you could have determined using MCDA. For example, that you could have got the same benefits for 25% less money, or you could have spent the same amount and got 25% more benefits, or somewhere in between.

Krysalis has been around since the early 90s but it has historically concentrated on providing its software to pharmaceuticals, government bodies and so on. However, it has realised (somewhat belatedly in my opinion) that it has a useful contribution to make to IT decision making.

The company has two products: OnBalance and HiPriority. The former is designed to support product selection while the latter is intended for situations where you have multiple choices to make from a wide set of choices. In an IT environment, OnBalance might be used if you have to evaluate multiple products in or order to make a selection, while HiPriority to determine how you were going to use this year's budget - you have multiple projects that you could undertake but you can't do them all - how do you decide which ones to adopt?

Krysalis makes its products available both as conventional software together with training so that you can use it yourself on an ongoing basis, or it is available as a service with Krysalis providing facilitators to drive the process. The latter is usually preferred when there is only a single project that you want to use MCDA for. Whatever the case, the total cost will not be in more than four figures, so for large investments or budgets, it is easily affordable.

I haven't the space to go into the details of either of Krysalis' products but they certainly look well thought out and allow you to change criteria, weightings and so forth after the initial data capture. You can also define dependencies and exclusions and do sensitivity analyses.

However, arguably the best thing about MCDA is that if someone questions your decisions later, you can point to a rigorous methodology that you used as the basis for those decisions. That's a back up that I am sure many CIOs will appreciate.

Philip Howard
Bloor Research

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