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John Saaty, co-founder and CEO of Decision Lens, has been immersed in the world of technology from a young age. Growing up with mathematician parents who ran a software startup from their home, John and his brother were exposed early on to the world of computing and entrepreneurship. This foundation set the stage for John's impressive career journey and the eventual founding of Decision Lens.
During Decision Lens’ Modernizing Government Planning and Budgeting podcast, John shared his wide-ranging experience across the tech industry - from coding and data organization at Accenture, to hardware launches at Intel, to e-commerce systems and consumer software. However, it was the groundbreaking decision-making theory developed by his father, Dr. Thomas Saaty, that fully laid the groundwork for Decision Lens.
Dr. Thomas Saaty, a renowned mathematician, developed the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) theory in the 1970s to address a key gap he encountered while the US was negotiating nuclear disarmament with the USSR. As John describes, "Our economists could not agree on what our priorities were…they focused only on the financial aspects of decommissioning, storing, and shipping nuclear material. The Soviets just had a much more multivariate approach to it. They said, 'Well cost is one thing, but we look at a variety of factors that include intangibles - geopolitical influence, environmental factors, safety factors, quality of life...'"
Facing a lack of frameworks to align stakeholders and establish clear priorities, Dr. Saaty created AHP as a quantitative approach for complex, multi-criteria decision-making. Over the ensuing decades, AHP was applied to numerous high-stakes policy decisions worldwide, from overcoming apartheid in South Africa to Poland's adoption of the Euro.
While AHP gained traction for weighty geopolitical matters, John and his brother saw even greater potential. "We said, 'Dad's theory is great, but really we think it's got much deeper and broader applicability toward the decisions people are making every day as they run their business.'"
This insight became the impetus for Decision Lens - to commercialize AHP via software for critical portfolio planning, budgeting, and resource allocation needs across the government. As John framed it, "Why don't we start a software company that applies Dad's theory?"
By integrating a proven academic decision-making framework into a software platform, Decision Lens has enabled public sector organizations to optimize limited resources against competing priorities in an objective, data-driven manner. It is designed to meet the unique challenges of government planning, where rapidly developing the correct strategies and meeting mission goals are the driving imperatives.
As John explains, government agencies are not motivated by ROI or stock prices, but rather by mission objectives - securing the food supply, protecting the nation, or managing federal real estate, to name a few. Decision Lens' software is purpose-built to help these organizations quantify intangible factors and make complex investment tradeoffs to best advance their missions.
"Whether it's DoD, civilian, intelligence, state/local - they're dealing with portfolios that consist of numerous potential directions," John says. "How do they best meet the outcomes of these organizations based on these investments they're going to make?"
Traditionally, agencies have relied on cumbersome and siloed spreadsheet-based processes, which John estimates lag 10-15 years behind the commercial sector. "To drive a planning process, they basically take these spreadsheets and email them around, do what's called a data call...by the time you get it, the situation on the ground may have changed already."
In contrast, Decision Lens offers a cloud-based platform to collaboratively gather pre-decisional data, apply a rigorous prioritization and tradeoff methodology based on the AHP theory, and leverage computing power to optimize funding scenarios.
"What Decision Lens brings to the table is a comprehensive, end-to-end planning process," John explains. "Once they have all this information in, they can say 'here's our priorities right now, and based on evaluation of all the different elements, here's the ones that best meet what we're trying to accomplish.'"
This approach yields powerful results and efficiency. "We've been told, literally, that they've taken the process from what could be months down to days, because they're able to reallocate, look at different scenarios, and figure out what gets them to the best outcome based on the resources they have."
Decision Lens breaks down its differentiated capabilities into three key components:
- Prioritize – A collaborative process to define and weight decision criteria using pairwise comparisons, creating a "strategic topography" to guide investment decisions
- Plan – Evaluate and select investment alternatives that best advance weighted priorities
- Fund – Rapidly analyze a multitude of funding scenarios using algorithms to optimize budget allocation
The "secret sauce" lies in harnessing both human judgment and computational power - what John calls "human intelligence on the front end, computing horsepower on the back end." This stands in stark contrast to business intelligence tools that provide data visualization but lack true decision support and tradeoff analysis.
Underscoring the significance of Decision Lens' public sector focus, John summarizes, "Our goal is to change how the government does planning, and it's going to benefit all Americans, all taxpayers."
With a proven prioritization methodology and modern software platform, Decision Lens enhances alignment between agency taxpayer dollars and mission outcomes. As public sector organizations face unprecedented challenges and constrained resources, data-driven optimization has never been more vital.
The company's origin story highlights how one academic's innovative theory, combined with the right technology and business vision, became a powerful force for modernizing decision-making and optimizing resources to aid government agencies in achieving their mission.
Check out the full podcast episodes to listen to the whole conversation with John here.
