What Is Decision Advantage? Its Impact on Modern Defense Strategies

Operational excellence is a must for any military member, with decision-makers needing up-to-date and relevant intelligence to plan and manage an operation. Achieving decision advantage ensures an operation’s decision-makers have the intelligence they need to coordinate operations and use their teams and resources most effectively. As the military aims to achieve decision advantage, decision support systems (DSSs) and secure collaboration tools have become an integral part of these efforts.

Learn more about decision advantage, strategies to achieve it, and the potential pros and cons of decision support systems.

What Is Decision Advantage?

In a modern defense context, the U.S. Air Force defines decision advantage as: 

“The product of situational understanding, the ability to assure and exchange information, make and communicate decisions by maintaining advantages in all domains.”

Decision advantage means that a decision-maker has the most accurate, up-to-date, and relevant information they need to make a decision. The decision-maker must have the resources (e.g., a DSS and secure communication tools) and expertise required to properly evaluate the intelligence they receive and make the best decision possible. 

What Are Decision Support Systems (DSS)?

A critical component of maintaining decision advantage is having a DSS in place. These systems refer to software that improves decision-making by gathering, analyzing, and synthesizing data before generating a report that includes recommendations for what actions a decision-maker should make. Since these programs can gather and analyze data faster than humans, they’re integral to achieving decision advantage.

In the military, DSSs have been deployed to help decision-makers make faster and more well-informed decisions. For example, the Air Mobility Command (AMC) utilizes a Global Decision Support System 2 for decision advantage. This DSS provides force- and unit-level mission planning, scheduling, and tracking of all air refueling and mobility airlift missions.

Decision Support System Advantages and Disadvantages for Decision Advantage

DSSs can be very beneficial for modern defense efforts, but they also have some potential drawbacks that decision-makers have to be aware of. 

Below, you can find a breakdown of the primary benefits and drawbacks of DSSs for decision advantage:

5 Advantages of Decision Support Systems for Decision Advantage

The advantages of DSSs for decision advantage include:

• Better informed decision-making: DSSs ensure commanding officers and other decision-makers have real-time access to important information. A decision-maker can analyze potential scenarios, spot trends in the data, and review an operation’s potential outcomes through the use of a DSS. All of these DSS capabilities give commanders the information they need to make better-informed plans and choices.
• Fast decision-making: Alongside helping commanders make more accurate and better-informed decisions, a DSS enables decision-makers to act quickly. Since decision advantage intelligence is often time-sensitive, commanders must act quickly before the data they’ve gathered becomes irrelevant. A DSS can evaluate information far faster than human beings, which allows decision-makers to decide on a plan of action quickly and gain an edge during an operation.
• Improved efficiency: A DSS improves efficiency across an entire team by eliminating the need for manual data collection and analysis. By automating these processes, staff members can be assigned to more important tasks, enhancing productivity and efficiency.
• Easier data visualization: Data can be hard to parse, particularly when you’re relying on huge amounts of data from multiple sources. DSSs make data easier to understand with interactive dashboards, graphs, and charts. Putting the data into a more easy-to-understand format allows team members and decision-makers to quickly understand the information in front of them and act on it for operational success.
• Reduced risk: Even the most well-planned and optimized operation will contain risks. A DSS can identify an operation’s potential risks and offer solutions to mitigate them. A DSS can also evaluate how different choices would potentially raise or lower certain risks, empowering decision-makers to better manage risks and make more informed decisions. 

5 Disadvantages of Decision Support Systems for Decision Advantage

While DSSs offer multiple advantages, they could have some potential disadvantages for the military. The primary potential disadvantages of a DSS include:

• Overreliance on AI for decision-making: Many DSSs include AI tools that help evaluate information and provide suggestions. While these tools can speed up the decision-making process, they can be overly relied on for decision-making. A good decision-maker will pair the DSS’s insights with their own intuition and expertise before they make a decision.
• High learning curve for users: Before a team can use a DSS effectively, they need to know how it works. Since these systems are sophisticated and have fairly high learning curves, the military must dedicate resources and time to DSS training.
• Potential data quality issues: A DSS relies on good-quality data from multiple sources to work effectively and help the military achieve decision advantage. When incomplete or inaccurate data is fed into a DSS, it can negatively impact the DSS’s ability to properly analyze a situation and provide accurate insights. Fortunately, this issue can be mitigated by investments in data quality management and the implementation of strict data governance processes.
• Potential security issues: Decision advantage intelligence will usually come from multiple sources, with team members needing to share it quickly with decision-makers. However, due to the potential security issues around quickly sharing data, some DSSs are supported by secure, real-time collaboration platforms that maintain highly secure communications. 
• Risk of misinterpreted analysis and bias: If biased input data is fed into a DSS, the DSS’s report may be biased as well. Even when the data isn’t biased, a user’s biases might cause them to misinterpret a DSS’s insights. As a result, decision-makers must prioritize the gathering of unbiased data and maintain a critical eye when reviewing analysis results.

Mattermost: Decision Advantage With Real-Time Collaboration and Secure Data Sharing

Alongside a DSS, you need a secure, real-time collaboration platform to share data and intelligence with decision-makers. Mattermost is trusted by the U.S. Air Force, NASA, and AMC for its ability to enable real-time command and control for decision advantage. With collaboration and workflow automation , self-hosted on-premises deployment options and a robust partner ecosystem to facilitate deployment and systems integration Mattermost is purpose-built for mission-critical workflows.Learn more about how we support decision advantage for defense and intelligence organizations today.