"Why are enterprise applications so dumb?"
With an eye-grabbing headline like that, who could ignore our own James Taylor's latest message that true actionable analytics require the ability to respond automatically and intelligently to events?
Today's BI and analytics solutions actually have a long way to go before they truly begin to make a difference and deliver value to organizations. Why? Because enterprise applications still "rely on human intelligence."
Is this such a bad thing? Well, James provides a rundown on where the process gets slowed considerably: "Humans must use dashboards and reports to learn from their data, most decisions are managed with work lists, someone has to log on and act-on work list items before a process continues, and most alerting and monitoring functions are focused on telling someone what has happened rather than on doing something about it."
Even the hot tickets of the moment -- Complex Event Processing/Business Activity Monitoring -- will fall short, James warns, "unless systems can respond intelligently and automatically to most events and this means making decisions about how to act without this reliance on people."
I agree with James that automated decisions triggered by events are the next big step in analytics. However, it seems that this is a huge leap for many organizations to take. One, because it requires a great deal of trust in systems acting on an unattended basis. We are seeing a lot of rudimentary automated decisioning occurring at a systems and nuts-and-bolts levels -- with self-healing networks, for example, that can automatically reroute workloads if transaction demand spikes. Some e-commerce Websites will provide automated approvals for loans or other transaction elements.
But, again, it may take time before these automated pathways start being applied to critical business decisions that affect jobs and treasure.
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