WALLDORF, Germany, Nov. 1, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- In its first collaborative decision-making (CDM) vendor profile, "Who's Who in Collaborative Decision Making," (September 1, 2011) Gartner Inc. has recognized SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) for collaborative decision-making.

According to Gartner analyst Rita Sallam, "CDM platforms combine business intelligence with social networking and other technologies to bring together the right people and the information and analysis tools they need for effective decision making." The full report explores the high-level requirements of a comprehensive CDM platform required for effective decision-making and highlights vendors with offerings that support typical decision-making processes.

A cloud-based collaborative decision-making application that transforms the way people work, SAP StreamWork brings order to chaos by uniting people, information and structured business tools for closer collaboration and improved productivity. The application gives people friendly tools for structuring and tracking conversations, documents, data and decisions for future reference. Notifications, activity streams and action items keep everyone in the loop. SAP StreamWork is an affordable and secure application that is easy to use and learn without requiring a long technology implementation.

"We believe Gartner's report is further confirmation that SAP is headed in the right direction with our social enterprise strategy focus on enabling business collaboration and decisions with the right data all in one place," said Jack Miller, general manager and global vice president, SAP StreamWork. "The social enterprise is first and foremost about enterprise and only SAP can deliver on the vision of integrating the right data needed directly from our portfolio into the conversation inside SAP StreamWork."

Who's Who in Collaborative Decision Making

1 September 2011

Rita L. Sallam

Research Note G00214928

http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-17PZ5EJ&ct=111019&st=sb

CDM platforms combine business intelligence with social networking and other technologies to bring together the right people and the information and analysis tools they need for effective decision making. Gartner discusses some of the leading vendors in this area and explains their offerings.

Overview

This report highlights vendors offering collaborative decision-making (CDM) platforms. These platforms support improved decision quality and transparency by assisting the right decision makers to find relevant information, discuss an issue, assess and document assumptions, brainstorm and evaluate options, agree on a course of action and then capture the process to mine and reuse best practices.

Key Findings

CDM platforms are emerging to fill the gap in decision support for tactical and strategic decisions most often made by knowledge workers. CDM platforms combine business intelligence (BI) and other sources of information used for decision making with social networking and collaboration capabilities, decision support tools, methodologies and models to improve and capture the decision process.

Some BI vendors are adding social software capabilities to their BI platforms to enable collaborative BI — some vendors use the term social BI — to facilitate discussion among decision makers on specific BI content, as opposed to collaboration on the entire decision process that CDM supports. Collaborative BI provides part of the functionality of what a broader CDM platform could enable and could be a steppingstone to broad and deep support for CDM, but collaborative BI does not equal CDM.

The primary challenge to CDM adoption is cultural. CDM will tend to be adopted in more progressive companies that view and value fact-based decision making as a core competency and critical to their success. Initial adoption of CDM has been within workgroups or lines of business concerning specific business-process-centric decisions, such as resource allocation optimizations, vendor selection, planning and forecasting, and new product planning.

Recommendations

Find a senior business executive willing to sponsor cultural change in support of fact-based, transparent decision making. The BI competency center is a logical place from which to spearhead a CDM initiative. Demonstrate the value of CDM through pilot projects, decision audits and simulations. Linking decisions to performance metrics, training decision makers in decision-making best practices, and using CDM in trade-off and optimization decisions will further demonstrate the value of CDM. Focus initially on definable departmental, line-of-business or process-specific decision processes, such as vendor selection, portfolio optimization, strategy management or forecasting, where the benefit of higher-quality and transparent decision making is easy to measure.