ChoiceAnalyst Overview
ChoiceAnalyst has nearly an infinite number of applications and is such a useful tool that it will be used in any application where decisions must be made. Its been said that even the act of making no-decision is in and of itself a decision to take no action. This is quite true so the real question is how well will one person or a group make a decision.
The objective of any decision no matter how large or small is to effect a positive outcome.
How does one do that? One can trust their intuition and often this is effective but how does one validate their intuition or instruct others. Intuition is a very powerful tool in a human being's arsenal to sort out and narrow the range of possibilities but while its often a necessary component its also generally insufficient as many studies have shown. intuition acts as a guide often in gathering more information and narrowing down the decision to its essence.
ChoiceAnalyst was designed for individuals, small businesses and large corporations to gather data into a model and calculate a best decision ranking. This ranking may identify the best decision or it may narrow it down to the top two or three decisions that deserve closer scrutiny but its effect to amplify and supplement human reasoning capabilities not replace them.
Consider what we use computers for - most often we use them as machines capable of vast calculations and capable of remembering thousands of variables. Decision complexity grows with the number of alternatives to select and compare by N-squared and therefore grows very rapidly. Its a well known metric in psychology that human beings can remember at most 7 distinct items of information in memory at the same time. Adding in multiple decision makers and multiple criteria adds considerably to the complexity. ChoiceAnalyst takes some of the complexity out of decision making by sorting, sifting, and analyzing the data that is produced by the decision model.
ChoiceAnalyst was designed to give you more confidence in your decision capability. Using it will provide some re-assurance that you didn't forget some detail that would have provided a different choice and therefore potentially better outcome for you and those affected by your decision.
ChoiceAnalyst's simplicity adds to its usefulness while not detracting from its sophistication as a modeling program.
When you're done with a ChoiceAnalyst decision model you will have listed all the decision maker and their relative importance to the decision, you will have listed the criteria that directly affects and characterizes the outcome of your decision and finally you will have compared choices to each other in the context of a given decision maker and criterion and selected one as better than the other but also how much better it is. ChoiceAnalyst lets you fine tune this process with options that control the data generation and interpretation of that data.
ChoiceAnalyst is a self contained system for decision making.
After using ChoiceAnalyst you'll have more insight into your decision and perhaps the decision will present itself right away. Decisions are very difficult due to the uncertainty involved, ChoiceAnalyst helps reduce this uncertainty.
ChoiceAnalyst is also powerful system for tracking past decisions. Because decisions can be stored in an XML file as well as a PDF file anyone can view, one can have confidence that any decision made was the result of thoughtful and carefully considered analysis. Many times people question why a decision was made today or a year or more ago yet no documentation exists to detail why the decision was made among the available alternatives. This often takes place during product comparisons, why was 1 vendors product chosen over another. These trade studies are rarely if ever documented adequately. It is far more likely that participants will carry out a decision if they understand its origins. ChoiceAnalyst bridges this documentation and review gap yet it requires very little time and effort to generate and evaluate a decision model.