Software Helps Users Make Hard Decisions
Life is full of choices. Whom should I hire as my new assistant? What kind of car should I buy? What software should my company use?
Now there is a genre of software dedicated to helping you solve these and other dilemmas.
Your first reaction might be, “I don’t need a computer to help me make a decision.” But after using a couple of programs, you might begin to see their value.
To begin with, a decision-support program forces you to establish and articulate your options and criteria for major decisions.
I’m not sure that I’d use the software for making a personal decision, but it’s a very good idea if you’re involved in a group decision or one that must be carefully documented for legal or business reasons.
Such programs are especially helpful when making personnel decisions. Equal opportunity laws and common decency require employers to make such decisions without regard to race, religion, sex and similar factors.
Decision-support programs, in general, require decision makers to establish uniform criteria and options as well as an understanding of who is involved with the decision.
If a company has to trim its payroll from 100 people down to 90, you can be sure that most of the 10 who lose their jobs will feel cheated.
Some may imply that they were unfairly dismissed and challenge the decision. No software can make them feel better, but at least the company has documentation to show that all employees were rated by the same criteria.
The two programs I looked at, BestChoice3 and Decision Pad, require users to establish a set of options as well as a uniform set of criteria that is applied to each option.
Criteria and evaluators can be weighted. Performance might be very important while tidiness is only slightly important. More important criteria is given a higher weight. Same with evaluators.
The opinions of the employee’s supervisor might have more weight, while his or her office mates have less authority. If anyone ever challenges the decision, the company can turn to the program for help in defending the decision.
BestChoice3 and Decision Pad use different means to solve the same types of problems--allowing one or several people to make a choice among a variety of options.
BestChoice3 is amazingly easy to use. Its install program copies the necessary files from your floppy disk to your hard disk while treating you to some simple computer animation.
You begin the decision-making process by creating a model. This involves telling the program the options you’re choosing from as well as the criteria and “decision makers” to be consulted.
These decision makers can include you, your colleagues, your spouse or anybody else involved in the decision. If the opinions are of equal weight, you assign a 100% to each decision maker.
If one has more pull, you assign that person a higher number. Later, you can change the influence of any decision maker by adjusting his or her weight.
Criteria is the basic raw material of any decision. A decision on what car to buy, for example, might include such criteria as fuel economy, reliability, safety, comfort and, of course, price.
The program requires that you enter your criteria along with a weight. A car’s safety is likely to be weighted higher than, say, color.
The program asks each decision maker to react to each criteria by selecting the option that best meets that criteria.
If you’re choosing among several cars, the program simplifies the task by grouping them into pairs.
So, rather than rate each car in the group, you are presented two options and asked to indicate which is better based on the criterion on the screen.
A built-in algorithm analyzes the data and displays overall ratings and results.
A numerical score is assigned to each option so you can easily determine close calls. Results can also be displayed by a bar chart.
If you’re not happy about the results, you can always change the weight of either an option or a decision maker.
The best-looking car may come out in front of one that is safer or less expensive. If you’re unhappy about that, you can go back and lower the weight on appearance or raise the weight on safety or price.
Or if you and your spouse have differing opinions, you can assign more weight to the person who is most likely to drive the car.
BestChoice3 requires an IBM or compatible PC with 256 kilobytes of random access memory.
It supports color or monochrome display. A mouse and printer are optional. Sterling Castle, maker of the program, is located at 702 Washington St., Suite 174, Marina del Rey, Calif. 90292. Phone: (800) 323-6406 or (213) 306-3020.
Decision Pad is more sophisticated, but at $295 it is also three times more expensive and harder to learn.
Nevertheless, additional features make it an excellent choice for certain organizations and applications.
Besides, once you invest the time to learn the product, it’s no longer all that hard to use.
The system uses a spreadsheet-like model for entering and analyzing data.
As with BestChoice3, you enter options, criteria and a list of decision makers. Both criteria and decision makers can be weighted just as with BestChoice3.
Entering the data is easy enough but I found it difficult and time consuming to create a new model.
As with anything else, you improve over time, which causes me to recommend the program to people or corporations that plan to use it frequently or have monumental decisions that warrant the user’s investment in time and money.
The latest version allows you to evaluate options with as many as 250 criteria. It also offers a “balloting” system whereby multiple evaluators, working at their own PC, can “vote” on a decision.
Data can be sent to whomever is coordinating the process via floppy disk or over a local area network.
You can import data from Ashton-Tate’s dBase database program or plain text and export data as plain files so it can be used in spreadsheets, data base and word processing programs.
Decision Pad has a lot of help features. Press F1 and the program figures out what you’re doing and provides you pertinent information.
There is also a self-running demo that creates and analyzes sample data.
Best of all, there is now a “jump start” feature that takes you step by step through creating your own model.
This innovative feature is like having an attentive instructor at your side. This feature is much more than a typical self-running demo.
Decision Pad requires at least 300 kilobytes of random access memory as well as two floppy disks or a hard disk.
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