James Taylor's Decision Management

Nice article on Business Activity Monitoring over at the Business Integration Journal. Mark (of Griffiths Waite) and Markus (of Oracle) summarize different levels of development towards a closed-loop solution, one in which experience with a process constantly improves the process.

Now Oracle's approach (about which I have blogged before) to business process has a nice concept in it - a decision service. The idea is that services that make decisions for use in a process are a special kind of service and that they deserve a distinct approach - a rules-based one. This is, of course, close to my heart and very much how decision management should be used. However, there was one area missing from the article - the potential for analytics to be used as part of the decisioning process. Not only can analytic approaches be used to mine data for business rules so that decision services use statistically significant rules, predictive analytic models can be developed to enhance the information being processed by adding predictions, risk assessments, future profitability measures and so on. By enhancing decision services with analytics, not just rules, we can close the loop in a second way, one using the data created by a process.

For those of you looking for some background on predictive analytics, try the predictive analytic FAQ over on my other blog.