PAD 520 Week 5 Discussion 1 Approaches to Forecasting Policy Outcomes

Approaches to Forecasting Policy Outcomes

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Approaches to Forecasting Policy Outcomes

A policy decision defines the fundamental principles of an organization and also establish the manner in which it will develop and operate in future. There is a limit to operational decisions made in an organization; this limit is set by the policies. The purpose of a policy decision is to limit the activities the organization can engage in without amending its policies (Amstrong, 2001).

The following is a hypothetical situation that requires a policy decision to be made. A user who tries to access protected resource to retrieve data, encounters different deployment variables. Examples of the deployment variables are: several authentication levels and presence of firewall. In real-life, protected resources with deployment variables (for example, web server) require several authentication levels.

There are different deployment variables and layers of complexity are added by the variables. Here, the user is allowed to access the resource (such as the web) without the need to provide any authentication. However, access to protected resources is prohibited without authentication. Authentication may also requires the user to make or accept certain terms and conditions before he or she can be allowed to access the resource

Forecasting is a process that is designed to use past and present information in decision-making, planning and making predictions of the future. The most suitable approach to forecasting that can be applied here is judgmental forecasting. In judgmental forecasting, resources such as instinct are used to predict what will happen. The bases of such feelings are then used to make executive decisions.

Firstly, different types of decision or advice rely on making judgment on what could happen in future and the manner in which events are affected by our own actions. Secondly, judgmental forecasting is useful when something new is being introduced or when there is absence of historical data. Thirdly, there are instances where information required is incomplete.

References

Amstrong, J. S. (2001). Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Reasearchers and Practitioners. Norwell, Massachusetts: Kluwer Academic Publishers.