James Taylor's Decision Management

Elizabethpointed me at a recent IDC report ("Worldwide Business Intelligence Tools 2005 Vendor Shares" by Dan Vesset and Brian McDonough). While this was mostly concerned with the big Business Intelligence vendors and their market share it had an interesting emerging trend (one of four) - Intelligent Process Automation. Described as BI "embedded within the operational applications" and "the automation of repeatable, operational decisions". This is what I call "Decision Management" or "Enterprise Decision Management". I am very glad to see this come up as a concept, albeit an emerging one, at IDC. Gartner has a similar term - Analytical Process Controlling- that is one of their future trends and also boils down, IMHO, to what I mean by Enterprise Decision Management. To demonstrate this, let me repeat my standard definition of EDM:

Enterprise Decision Management(EDM) is a systematic approach to automating and improving operational business decisions.
EDM aims to increase the precision, consistency and agility of these decisions while reducing the time taken to decide and the cost of the decision.

I believe that the best way to do this is to turn your analysis or analytics into executable, predictive analytics and embed them in business rules-based (operational) decision services that are made available to all your business processes. Doing this allows you to take control of the key decisions within your processes and analytically enhance them. There's more on this here.