James Taylor's Decision Management

I saw this interesting post on CIO magazine this week - Are You a Dinosaur? Besides resonating with me (I have a teenager who never answers emails and always communicates by IM for instance), Abbie's article made me think about how consumer technology (myspace, amazon.com, eBay etc) impacts commercial or B2B software. Think about it. Your customers and prospects - the people who use your software - are going to be out and about on the web. They are going to come across these technologies and across websites that are highly personalized, make great suggestions, seem to "read their mind" in terms of their desires and behaviors, remember what they told them and where they were last. These customers are going to expect your software to do the same. You had better be able to make your systems change quickly (to respond to these trends) and you had better be able to personalize your interacts based on all the information you have about someone. Otherwise you are going to end up with unhappy customers. Interestingly, this kind of competitive pressure does not require one of your competitors to adopt the approach! 

So what does this have to do with decisioning? Well, one of the areas where consumer sites and technologies excel is in personalization and inference of your desires/preferences. Business rules and predictive analytics - decisioning technologies - are great ways for businesses to add these kinds of capabilities that are enterprise-ready, scalable, compatible with your existing technology stack etc etc. Check out some of these consumer sites. See how the interaction feels. Think about how a user of those sites will expect your software to behave.