DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed)

DACI stands for Driver, Approver, Contributors, and Informed — a decision-making framework that assigns each of those four roles to people involved in a single decision, so everyone knows who does what. The Driver is the one person who corrals the group, gathers the information, sets the scope, and pushes the decision to a conclusion by an agreed date; the Driver runs the process but does not make the call. The Approver is the single person who actually decides — they have the vote. Contributors have subject-matter knowledge and offer recommendations, so they have a voice but not a vote. The Informed are people whose work the decision touches and who should be told once it is made. DACI was developed at Intuit as a variation of the older RACI matrix, aimed squarely at clarifying who drives a decision and who makes the final call.

DACI matters because group decisions often stall in one of two ways — either everyone thinks they decide, which breeds politics and paralysis, or no one owns the decision, which breeds drift. By naming a single Driver to move the decision and a single Approver to make it, DACI cuts through both. The split between Driver and Approver is the framework's signature move: the person running the process is deliberately separate from the person with the final say, so the work of organizing a decision does not get confused with the authority to make it. Used on a real choice — a launch date, a vendor, a roadmap bet — DACI turns a fuzzy meeting into a clear assignment of who advises, who decides, and who simply needs to hear the outcome.

DACI is one of several role-assignment frameworks, and it helps to see how it differs from its cousins. The RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) is a general responsibility-assignment tool for tasks and deliverables, not specifically for decisions; its single Accountable role names who owns the outcome of a piece of work. DACI is narrower and aimed at one decision, splitting that ownership into a Driver who runs the process and an Approver who decides. Bain's RAPID framework (Recommend, Agree, Perform, Input, Decide) is also decision-focused, but it carries extra roles — an Agree role that must sign off and a Perform role that executes — so it suits more complex, cross-functional decisions where execution and veto rights need to be named explicitly.

Practically, you reach for DACI when you want a lightweight, fast way to clarify a single decision and, above all, to fix who decides. You reach for RACI when you are mapping responsibilities across many tasks in a project or process. You reach for RAPID when a weighty decision spans several functions and you need to spell out who must agree and who will carry it out, not just who decides. The shared thread is naming exactly one decider — DACI's Approver, RAPID's Decide, RACI's single Accountable — because diffused authority is what wrecks group choices. DACI's distinctive contribution is the clean Driver-and-Approver split that keeps process ownership and decision authority from blurring together.

Using DACI well starts with picking a decision worth the structure — a real, consequential choice, not a routine one — and then naming exactly one Approver. The temptation to list two or three approvers is the fastest way to recreate the paralysis DACI exists to cure, so resist it. Choose a Driver who has the time and standing to actually push the decision forward, keep the Contributor list to people who genuinely add insight, and tell the Informed group early what is coming and late what was decided. Agree on a date by which the Approver will decide, so the process does not drift. Write the roles down where everyone can see them, because the value of DACI is shared clarity, not a private mental model held by the Driver alone.

The common failures are naming more than one Approver (which dissolves the single-decider rule), choosing a Driver with no authority or bandwidth to move things, stuffing the Contributor list until advice becomes noise, and forgetting the Informed entirely so people are blindsided. The discipline is to keep DACI lightweight and honest: one Approver, one capable Driver, a tight set of Contributors, a clear Informed list, and a deadline. Used that way on the decisions that matter, DACI reliably converts a stuck, over-attended discussion into a clear, accountable choice with a named owner.

DACI (Driver, Approver, Contributors, Informed) — an Intuit-developed decision framework adapted from RACI — clarifies group decisions by naming a Driver to run the process and one Approver to decide.

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