What is a Decision Flow?
A decision flow is a diagram that helps make the decision between alternative courses of action that will lead to and effect a business decision.
Why it matters
Decision flows codify how analysts navigate from a business question to an answer, making tacit reasoning explicit and repeatable. They structure multi-step investigation — what data to pull, what rules to apply, what recommendation to surface — so decision-making becomes consistent across users and scalable across use cases.
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Related concepts
Decision intelligence is a data-driven process that enables you to rapidly make faster, more accurate fact-based decisions rather than relying on intuition or gut feel. The approach combines decision-making techniques with AI, ML, contextual intelligence, and automation to generate actionable business recommendations. Rather than replacing human judgment, Decision Intelligence augments human ability to make better and more consistent decisions.
Business rules guide the everyday decision-making within businesses by outlining the relationships between objects, such as customer names and their corresponding orders. Business rules provide the foundation for automation systems by taking documented or undocumented information and translating it into various conditional statements.
The OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) is a framework for decision-making that emphasizes filtering available information, putting it in context, and quickly making the most appropriate decision while remaining adaptable as new data emerges. The process involves collecting relevant information, recognizing potential biases, deciding and acting, and understanding that adjustments can be made with additional data.
Machines generate recommendations for decisions, including an expected business outcome — for example: "Buy X units from supplier Y, then you will save $Z million." The machine proposes the decision, but people make it. The user accepts, rejects, or changes the recommendations for a decision.