Executive Overview
ForeTell® – Test Drive Your Critical Decisions
ForeTell helps you make critical decisions more effectively. Using your own organizational knowledge, ForeTell helps you anticipate and assess the likely outcomes of alternate decisions in complex situations, and select the most robust course of action.
As a consumer, you probably wouldn’t buy a car without test-driving it first: a test drive allows you to verify that the vehicle satisfies your wants and needs, before purchasing it. Similarly, ForeTell enables you to test drive critical organizational decisions before committing to implement them. ForeTell provides a low-risk method for exploring and validating candidate decisions in a virtual environment, helping you:
• Optimize investments of scarce capital, human resources, effort and time
• Anticipate and avoid unintended consequences of prospective courses of action
• Prevent costly failures and the need to reverse their consequences: revamping strategy or policy initiatives, writing off investments, and repairing relationships
• Adopt and ensure uniform and rigorous “due diligence” decision processes
ForeTell applications help you answer key business and policy questions:
• Should we expand existing sales channels? Develop new ones? Abandon some?
• Should we increase capacity? If so, how? By building, acquiring or outsourcing?
• Should we develop new products or lines of business? Merge? Acquire? Divest?
• How will proposed legislation or regulations impact social and economic conditions?
• How should we improve our business processes? Which should we outsource?
• Are our initiatives performing as expected? If not, how should we modify them?
Critical decisions in business and government are difficult to think through because they involve large numbers of “moving parts” −volatile markets; diverse stakeholders, roles and behaviors; complex interactions between decision factors; and stakeholders continually adapting in response to one another’s moves. Such complexities quickly overwhelm conventional decision support tools such as spreadsheets and decision trees. Lacking effective tools, organizations must rely on static research studies, gut instinct and ad hoc rationalizations when deciding their future directions.
ForeTell enables your organization to explore complex decisions in a systematic and disciplined manner, using advanced modeling techniques and analysis tools. The ForeTell solution encompasses four software and consulting components. The software components comprise a software package called ForeTell-DSS®.
• Modeling framework. ForeTell-DSS’s patent-pending framework simplifies the daunting task of developing meaningful decision models for your business or government agency. A ForeTell-DSS application codifies relevant decision factors, both qualitative and quantitative, and available expert knowledge about the diverse sources of change in your environment and their dynamics. This application helps specify Scenarios that capture the facts and assumptions about your particular situation – characterizing your current environment, stakeholders, their attributes and relationships, and anticipated forces, trends, and events that might act to create a possible future. Each Scenario also describes a candidate decision – one course of action under your consideration. This information is stored in a repository for later extension, updating, or adaptation to try new variations.
• Simulation engine. ForeTell-DSS’s patent-pending simulator executes your Scenarios. This engine simulates the likely interactions of your stakeholders with one another and your environment over time, by applying the behavioral knowledge embedded in the decision application. Simulating a Scenario produces a detailed
dynamic projection of the likely consequences of one candidate decision for your stakeholders under one set of assumptions about future trends and events. The resulting performance metrics offer unique insights to drive your decision process. These outputs can also be fed into your enterprise performance models, to help assess the cost-benefit impact and viability of each candidate decision.
• Data analysis tools. ForeTell-DSS’s integrated analytics quickly reduce the simulator’s “what-if” outputs to help you focus on key decision issues and concerns. You use a simple point-and-click interface to generate charts and reports that summarize behavior patterns and other projected results. Analyzing and comparing Scenario outcomes helps you understand and anticipate the likely responses of your organization and stakeholders to your decisions. The result: higher quality decisions.
• Consulting services. DecisionPath supplies the expertise and methodology to build custom applications for you, define Scenarios and candidate strategies, and analyze and compare simulation results to help guide your decisions. We often partner with leading management consultants to deliver best practices solutions to you.
ForeTell allows your organization to manage decisions across their full lifecycles. The process starts by using ForeTell-DSS to model your decision context and help select the most robust course of action. Next, ForeTell-DSS helps test and refine implementation plans for the selected decision, ensuring a smooth rollout. Over time, you monitor execution results, stakeholder responses and relevant environmental changes. You can update your initial Scenarios by feeding back this performance data. Simulating the updated Scenarios produces revised outcomes for analysis. This iterative exercise serves to re-validate your original decision or raise early warning of adverse trends. Such signals provide major competitive advantages, enabling you to react quickly to changing conditions and adapt your course of action to ensure continued success. ForeTell analyses produce explicit, interactive “audit trails” of decisions, which provide baselines for continuous improvement, both of your decision processes and ForeTell models.
ForeTell is industry- and decision-independent. ForeTell-DSS is a flexible platform that supports decision support solutions across diverse sectors and issues. Examples include managing portfolios of new product development or information technology investments; evaluating acquisitions other strategic transactions; managing organizational change; and executive training. Government uses include policy analysis, military strategy, program development, and homeland security preparedness.
ForeTell helps you manage outcomes, not just risks. Risk management focuses on managing the downside, by adopting a defensive, reactive approach to decision-making. ForeTell goes beyond this by allowing you to assess both the strengths and weaknesses of your candidate decisions, both individually and holistically. Relative to a given context and level of investment, large rewards often warrant taking large risks. ForeTell enables you to make considered decisions that balance your potential rewards against your potential risks, rather than acting solely to minimize risks. ForeTell helps you succeed.
Features
➢ Dynamic “what-if” analysis
➢ Executable decision model
➢ Key situational metrics tie into performance models (revenue, fatalities…)
➢ 360° view captures all model actors’ perspectives
➢ Best practices methodology based on scenario planning
Benefits
➢ Focus on critical issues
➢ Re-visit periodically to:
• Update inputs & refine model
• Re-validate or adapt decisions
➢ Manage uncertainty proactively
• Detect adverse trends early
• Prepare contingency plans
➢ Minimize risks of
• Capital investment
• Time & resources
• Market positioning
• Opportunity costs
Solution Elements
➢ Modeling framework
➢ Simulation engine
➢ Analysis tools
➢ Consulting services
The Bottom Line – DecisionPath’s ForeTell solution:
• Helps you establish a baseline for what to think about in making key decisions
• Supplies repeatable methods for how to approach key decisions
• Explicitly addresses diverse sources of change in dynamic decision environments
• Enhances quality & scope of due diligence decision processes
• Enhances decision selection, execution and follow-through
• Delivers competitive advantage by enabling you manage outcomes, not just risks
• Retains and leverages organizational best practices decision-making expertise
ForeTell enhances your capabilities to determine what needs to be done today to reach your goals tomorrow.
DecisionPath, Inc.
For more information, contact: info@decpath.com Tel: 617-794-9036
© DecisionPath, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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