Decision Work: Connecting Organisational Decision Making and Analytics

Organisations have invested extensively in data, analytics and related capabilities with the aim of improving decision making. Yet while analytical work has become increasingly explicit, specialised and systematically developed, much of the human and organisational work involved in developing decisions remains comparatively implicit. This conceptual paper argues that this asymmetry makes it difficult to connect analytics systematically to the decisions it is intended to support. The paper introduces Decision Work as an explicit representation of the recurring activities involved in developing organisational decisions. The Decision Work model comprises seven activities: Signal, Direction, Options, Consequences, Trade-offs, Select and Act, and Review and Improve. The model is then extended through the Decision Work–Analytics Framework, which connects decision work and analytics through the questions and information needs generated as a decision develops. Rather than beginning with available data and asking how it can be used, analytics is pulled into the decision work where it can help address those needs. This shifts the relationship from analytics push towards decision-work pull and provides a structure for collaboration between decision-makers and analytics professionals. The paper contributes a conceptual language and framework for making organisational decision work explicit and for connecting it more systematically to analytics.