Planning For Outcome Optimization While Reducing Costs... or Intelligently Doing More With Less

Government entities perpetually face the challenge of having to perform their missions within an environment of shrinking resources. "Cutting government spending" has become a unanimous call from all sides of the political spectrum. As a result of the global financial climate, in many countries, it is clear that those who are responsible for managing public sector operations will face considerable belt-tightening throughout the coming decade. It seems inevitable, therefore, that sacrifices will have to be made; that the level of service that government entities provide today will have to decrease and that managers will have to make painful decisions about where to cut. But is this the rght approach?

Make Mission Outcomes the Focus, not How Much To Cut

In today's ultra-expense-sensitive climate, it is easy to identify success as simply cost-cutting. Yet government administrators are not just responsible for prudent management of the public purse, but for delivery of the services their departments are charged with providing. The real challenge they face, in an era of resource tightening, is to determine how to deploy the resources available to them in a way that maximizes the goals they are trying to meet. However, the causal links between a budgeting decision and its ultimate effects on service delivery can be extremely complex. Even if executives in the public service set out to analyse how particular spending decisions affect service delivery outcomes, the magnitude of the task, using traditional tools, would simply be prohibitive. But now, however, there are new tools available, and they dramatically change what's possible.

Decision Modeling Makes Outcome-Driven Resource Allocation Feasible.

Decision Modeling, when implemented in Quantellia' World Modeler software provides the first practical platform for modeling the key relationships between an item of expenditure, its immediate consequences, the follow-on consequences of these, and so on, up to the effect on measurable outcomes. World Modeler provides decision makers with an environment that graphically simulates how decisions impact the key measurables of the business units for which they are responsible. Decision makers can tap on a screen and drag a symbol to indicate a change in spending priorities, and watch the effects of this ripple through their department and influence outcomes in real time.

Using Decision Modeling with World Modeler: A visual model of the factors that affect operational performance is created, using collaborative input from relevant stakeholders. The way that each element affects other elements in the model is entered. This can be obtained from - Data Sources, when available; - Estimates; - Human Expertise; Once the model has been created, it provides the basis for an objective, transparent institutional record of the decision-making process. It also allows decision makers to experiment with different decision options in a compelling, intuitive 3D graphical simulation, and understand the likely impact of each decision on outcomes.