James Taylor's Decision Management

I saw this interesting article today (on ebizQ) by John Senor - Business Intelligence Goes Deep. John starts off making some good points. He says that you need "enhanced business intelligence at the deepest level - embedded within essential business processes" and that "business interaction is about events that occur and how businesses respond to such events" given that those events "can trigger different responses that involve intelligent decision making". Absolutely. He goes on to say that for "process-driven BI, decision making is a fundamental aspect of any operational business process". And he's right about that too. I'm agreeing with so much of the article at this point that I could have written it myself! But then he loses me...

Discussing what events can cause processes to do, he discusses Alerts, Analytics, Data Visualization and Reporting. I'm a little worried now - after all decisions should result in ACTIONS not these other things. And then I notice that everyone of the four items talks about "users" -"allowing users to resolve issues" or "to inform users" or "enabling users". Now I have to disagree with him. If all your business intelligence/business process integration is doing is helping users then you are not going to deliver on straight-through processing or on automated decision-making and 24x7 responsiveness. For that, you need to embed intelligence into decision-making and that requires predictive analytics.

Now this theme has come up a couple of times recently (here and here). I believe that effective process automation requires effective decision automation and that the identification and automation of decision services delivers the integration points you need. Built for change and with business rules, these decision services are ideal for enhancement with executable intelligence in the form of predictive analytic - the business rules management system provides the platform for executing analytics.This allows you to use your data not just collect it and integrates with both Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).