Corporate decision analysis : an engineering approach

We explore corporate decisions and their solutions under uncertainty using engineering methods. Corporate decisions tend to be complex; they are interdisciplinary and defy programmable solutions. To address these challenges, we take an engineering approach. Our proposition is that as in an engineering system, corporate problems and their potential solutions deal with the behavior of systems. Since systems can be studied with experiments, we use Design of Experiments (DOE) to understand the behavior of systems within which decisions are made and to estimate the consequences of candidate decisions as scenarios. The experiments are a systematically constructed class of gedanken experiments comparable to "what if' studies, but organized to span the entire space of controllable and uncontrollable options. In any experiment, the quality of data is important. Grounded on the work of scholars, we develop a debiasing process for eliciting data. And consistent with our engineering approach, we consider the composite consisting of the organization, their knowledge, data bases, formal and informal procedures as a measurement system. We then use Gage theory from Measurement Systems Analysis (MSA) to analyze the quality of the measuring composite.