DECIDE™

FROM COMPLEXITY TO CLARITY

Survival often rests upon an organization’s ability to make correct and timely decisions, despite the complexity and uncertainty of the environment. Because of the difficulty of employing and scaling formal methods in this context, decision makers typically resort to informal methods, sacrificing structure and rigor. With the global landscape likely to feature a growing array of hard-to-track threats in the years ahead—as a result of the increasing availability of technical know-how and soaring interconnectivity, among other factors—the need for a process to produce sustained mindfulness will only grow. Even in the case of more traditional intelligence issues, developing and enhancing organizational processes designed to promote alternative analysis might encourage more systematic use of these tools.

We have developed a solution that retains the ease of use, the familiarity, and the free-form nature of informal methods, while benefiting from the rigor, structure, and potential for automation characteristic of formal methods. Our approach records analysts' thinking in a corporate knowledge base consisting of structured arguments. Structured argumentation is a method of reasoning characterized by explicit and detailed conclusions and supporting arguments. 

The benefits of using a structured approach to analysis are that it:

• Simplifies understanding lines of reasoning by analysts and management
• Facilitates learning analytic processes and methods by new or novice analysts
• Prompts analysts to identify hidden assumptions crucial to understanding the reasoning and evaluating the arguments
• Creates an organizational knowledge base and facilitates reuse
• Enables arguments to be easily communicated, explained, and compared
• Helps analysts perform deeper analysis more quickly
• Provides Flexible analysis diagnostic techniques
• Geo-coding of evidence

 

 

 

DECIDE™ is a leading edge intelligence analysis product that enables intelligence analysts to construct hypotheses and sub-hypotheses, create conjectures, build structured arguments, and associate evidence with the arguments using judicial proof techniques. DECIDE contains argument, timeline, and evidence visualizations, list and link analysis evidence marshaling tools that help analysts sort through massive and complex evidence sets to infer relationship inherent in the data. DECIDE enables analysts to set evidence credibility and relevance and then score the various hypotheses thus enabling analysts to compare argument strengths. DECIDE provides an interactive visualization of the scores that shows the relative support for the intelligence conclusions.

 

DECIDE enables analysts to build and manipulate structured arguments using judicial proof techniques, associate evidence with hypotheses and sub-hypotheses, and set evidence parameters including relevance and credibility.

 

DECIDE Provides:

• Audit trail from collection to policy
• Helps with critical thinking
• Supports reasoning about evidence and arguments
• Adds robustness to analysis
• Display geo-coded evidence on map images

 

Features

• Evidence models
• Argument construction and visualization
• Competing Hypotheses Evidence marshaling techniques
• Multiple scoring methods
• Flexible analysis diagnostic techniques
• Geo-coding of evidence

 

Using Decide

The following screencast demonstrates the features of DECIDE.

 

 

DECIDE brochure
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