 Online tool
supports better decision-making
By Grady Semmens
French imperialist Napoleon Bonaparte once said that “nothing is
more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.” Just
as these words applied to military campaigns in the 1800s,
decision-making is also the most critical factor for most businesses in
the so-called Information Age.
That’s why Bonaparte’s quotation is the slogan for a new system
developed by University of Calgary professor Dr. Guenther Ruhe to help
companies make important decisions based on knowledge, logic and a systematic
process.
“I would say that corporate decision-making is done just by intuition
95 percent of the time,” says Ruhe, holder of an industrial research
chair in software engineering in the U of C’s departments of computer
science and electrical and computer engineering. “While that is a
very important factor, I think many organizations can benefit
by incorporating sound methodology and their best possible
knowledge to prioritize decisions and to use this as part of
a systematic process.”
Ruhe and colleagues in the U of C’s software engineering laboratory
have come up with an online tool for planning and decision-making
that has been adopted by several high-profile corporations. Called ReleasePlanner™,
the technology is designed for use by organizations of all
shapes and sizes to solicit and manage input from clients, stakeholders
and employees; perform “what-if” scenarios
to explore possible outcomes; analyse risks; and prioritize
and incorporate various sources of information into business plans.
“There is never one easy solution, but this system helps provide
choices and qualifies decision-making,” Ruhe says. “It can
also help companies better understand their customer’s needs and
allow stakeholders to provide input from anywhere in the world
and perhaps give more objective opinions than they are able to during personal
meetings.”
Corporations—including the German technology giant Siemens, software
company Corel iGrafx, Calgary-based Chartwell Technologies
and the City of Calgary's Development and Building Approvals
group —have
used early versions of ReleasePlanner™ in
their operations with great success.
“ReleasePlanner™ is intuitive and easy to use,” says Siemens
department head Ludger Meyer. “It provides a simple and transparent
basis for making decisions by providing alternative strategies
for each modeled problem instance. We were particularly impressed by the
web-based remote access for stakeholders anywhere in the world at any time.”
The prioritization and strategic planning technology is a spin-off
from the research conducted at the U of C's Laboratory for
Software Engineering Decision Support. Interdisciplinarity,
interaction with industry and continuous empirical validation of the proposed
technologies are key principles of this research. In the case
of ReleasePlanner™,
it combines the rigour of formal modeling and efficiency of
computational algorithms with the intuition of the human expert
to provide solutions that have a high chance to solve the actual
problem.
For more information, visit the ReleasePlanner™ website at www.releaseplanner.com.
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