James Taylor's Decision Management

I saw this article on CIOInsight last week - Technology: Predictive Analytics Lets Companies See into the Future. This was one of the better articles on the use of predictive analytics. The marketing example is a classic use of predictive analytics in an operational setting - segmenting customers and then treating them differently in very high volume. Another of the examples talks about the need to apply rules on top of the analytics. There is also some good discussion on how it can be hard to collect the data and hard to analyze. I think the article missed one point- none of this is any good it you cannot apply it to your actual systems. Indeed it wrapped up by talking about the "outcomes of strategic maneuvers". But these outcomes will be changes in operational behavior for the most part and this requires a slightly different focus than the analysis/reporting/visualization typical of many predictive analytic solutions. Indeed the last question asked is in many ways the key one:

How can we integrate predictive analytics more tightly into our business processes?

Well you need to do a couple of things:

• Separate out the decisions you want to improve
• Make sure those decisions are automated using an appropriate technology like business rules
• Make sure you are generating predictive insight in a way that can be consumed by these decisions

I went through one process for succeeding at this hereand I wrote about how to use business rules to bring analytics into processes here.