A decision is more than an answer.
Companies often retain the ingredients of a decision in separate systems. The warehouse stores evidence. A governance platform stores policy. A workflow tool stores approval status. An operational platform stores execution. Reporting stores the later outcome.
A decision record binds those fragments to one decision identity. That makes the decision inspectable without assuming that any one source contains the complete truth.
Five questions define the record.
What evidence was available? Which policy version applied? Who held authority? What action was authorised? What outcome was later observed?
A record that cannot answer one of these questions may still be useful operationally, but its limitation should be explicit rather than silently reconstructed later.
The purpose is reconstruction, not retroactive certainty.
A decision record does not guarantee that the decision was correct. It makes the basis, authority and outcome reviewable, and it exposes missing evidence instead of filling the gap with a later narrative.