The iPod of Decision Makers

We face them every day, catching a break only in our dreams when they’re taken out of our hands. They’re decisions, and in the clinical trials industry—where the wrong ones can cost millions—they’re becoming a science thanks to Decision Lens (Arlington, VA).

At the helm of this young company are two brothers, MBAs who brought their father’s theory of analytic hierarchy process out of the halls of academia and into the light. From there, they built a technology platform based on the proven methodology that today is used across different fields.

In pharma, R&D portfolio managers use it to decide which products to bring to market and by IT to determine the right technology to support operations. One company selected a major CRO partner based on its calculations. And the NIH used it to evaluate 100s of cancer antigens and figure out which ones to fund.    

But according to John Saaty, one of the founding brothers and CEO of Decision Lens, the intended audience has always been senior-level decision makers.     

“I learned that senior-level decision makers don’t want to see all the gory complexities,” says Saaty. “They want to know that they have a process that’s been proven, and then they want to focus on the decision.”

In other words, they want what Decision Lens Suite provides: easy to use software that employs a proven mathematical formula to arrive at sound decisions minus the drama. Sounds almost magical, doesn’t it. But it’s no black box, promises Saaty.

“If you were going to buy a car, you’ve got a series of considerations in your head…performance, style, safety, storage space…and you probably have some idea of what’s more important and least,” he explains. “Decision Lens takes those criteria and asks you to trade them off each other [so] you can tell…what the most important characteristics of the car are. It’s a new way of thinking about decisions.”

One that brings to the table all stakeholders and weighs each one’s input. Which is what Saaty’s father sought when he began working on his theory.

Frustrated by his colleagues’ inability to agree on a common position during an arms control meeting with the Soviet Union in the late 60s/early ’70s, the mathematician was convinced there had to be a process that could bring together multiple stakeholder’s objectives, prioritize them, and determine a course of action.

The result of course was the analytic hierarchy process. And today, Decision Lens is working on the next generation version of it. So far the software prototype managed to figure out the exact order of cities chosen by the International Olympic Committee for the 2016 games four days before their final decision.

“There was a student group who applied it,” says Saaty. “They included a whole bunch of different factors about the cities (economic, security, infrastructure, tourists) and they actually came up with the cities in the exact order.”

Regardless of whether its first generation or second generation software, or what decisions it’s used to make, whether that’s what CRO to partner with, what investigator sites to select for a Phase I study or which players to pick in the NFL draft—think Green Bay Packers—the bottom line is always the same.

“The software helps you make decisions in a transparent and explicit way,” says Saaty, “because you know at each step of the way people have been involved in prioritizing the criteria and coming up with the value scores.”

(Picture by Danilo Rizzuti, courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net)