A major benefit of decision analysis is making the decision making process more transparent in terms of the factors considered, the ranges of data used and the preferences (e.g. risk tolerance) of the decision makers. For example, when there is disagreement on data associated with a variable, then this can be accommodated by making the probability ranges wide enough to encompass the differences and then you can see whether it really matters or not to the final decision. If it does, then you need to spend more time decomposing the sources of the disagreement and finding out the reasons. It is the insights gained from the decision analysis process itself that are often most useful for making better decisions.

On impact of monitoring initiatives, we should first separate the objective of monitoring to acquire basic knowledge of systems and the objective of aiding policy and management decisions. Our point is that it is often difficult to find evidence for impact of monitoring initiatives on the latter and that monitoring could be made much more efficient by first identifying the types of decisions of interest and then using formal analysis of those decisions to pinpoint areas with high information value.