You know the traditional holiday tune where one delivers increasingly grander gifts to his/her companion over the span of 12 days. I believe it draws a parallel to how one will feel upon starting up our forthcoming release DPL 9 -- licenses for which are now available for pre-release purchase at a 25% discount! It's the software tool that keeps giving when it comes to decision analytics, performance, interoperability and polish. So I give you Syncopation's interpretation of this holiday classic.
A common and challenging decision problem in the oil & gas industry is to decide how to explore an oil field. Typically there is a cluster of prospects, giving rise to a highly dependent set of uncertainties, according to their proximity and the geology of the area. For example, if you drill a well at one site and strike oil, it's more likely that a nearby prospect will also have oil. If you drill a few "dry holes", you'll probably give up on the field rather than throw good money at potentially poor prospects. This makes intuitive sense, but until recently it was tough to model in a decision tree.
"…the problem with resource allocation isn’t ignorance of its importance—83 percent of executives we polled named it as the most critical management lever for spurring growth." - McKinsey (Where, how much, and how: Answering the hardest questions of resource allocation)
And yet, McKinsey and Company go on to point out that a third of organizations included in a survey reallocate just 1% of capital from year to year. Whether you're talking about money, talent, or time these precious, finite resources tend to be handled by management teams with far too much safeguarding and rigidity -- leaving them in the dust of those who pursue a more deliberately dynamic resource allocation strategy.
As a market leader in decision analytic tools, we confidently stand by our claim that DPL is the most powerful, full featured application for decision tree and influence diagram modeling on the market today. DPL offers a dedicated, standalone graphical modeling interface for performing decision and risk analyses, Monte Carlo simulation, and Real Option valuation. The tool's flexibility and intuitiveness allow you to model the characteristics specific to your decisions with a precision unmatched by our competitors.
Syncopation's recent Fed Rate Hike promotion not only offers you an opportunity to save money on new or upgraded licenses of DPL, it also gives us a platform to discuss important decision making principles, like the value of information.
One of the most powerful facets of a Decision Analysis approach is the ability to explicitly calculate the value of information so one can make an intelligent choice about whether or not to buy it. If you've read our blog before you should already know the following wisdom about VOI:
After much ado the Federal Reserve decided to maintain interest rates at their current levels this past Wednesday -- which wasn't much of a surprise to most. The Syncopation team saw an opportunity to drum up the drama surrounding the Fed's upcoming November meeting by offering potentially huge savings on DPL licenses, with the amount of savings depending on the outcome of the FOMC's Nov 2 meeting. As a bonus, we're also providing a quick lesson on the value of imperfect information through our promotion. Read on for all the details.
Deploying a fully integrated PPM System within your organization doesn't have to be expensive, time-consuming, or painful! Embed Syncopation Software's DPMX System into your resource planning processes and start reaping the benefits a straightforward, cost-efficient portfolio analytic system backed by rigorous decision analytics and robust data management tools can bring to your team and portfolio.
In a previous post, Chris expounded on the methods for generating good tornado diagrams. It's relatively straightforward to create a meaningful tornado for a business problem defined by a few symmetric quantitative chance events (i.e., the kind with 10/50/90 assessments and Low/Nominal/High outcomes).
Are you a die-hard decision tree fan? Well then you've landed on the right blog. Let me first say that we here at Syncopation (publishers of class-leading decision tree software, DPL) have always prided ourselves on the fact that DPL's modeling interface offers a unique synergism of a Decision Tree and an Influence Diagram. We still hold those sentiments, but during the development of the latest DPL release we came to the realization that for certain users and/or decision-problems the Influence Diagram might be better off taking a backseat.