Building an SOA? What's Your Decision Strategy?

David Kelly wrote a nice little article today - Building an SOA? What's Your Data Strategy? in which he makes some good points about the importance of data in SOA. I particularly liked a couple of his points, although I might take them a step or two further - moving from data or information to decisions.

"Today's organizations need to be much more efficient in using information effectively, managing information efficiently, and turning that information into insight so that business decision makers can make the right decisions"

Dave is completely correct here but he limits himself. It is not enough to turn information into insight for business decision makers, you must also turn that information into insight for your information systems and automated business processes. Sadly business processes and systems cannot read reports or use OLAP cubes so the insight needs to be executable. As I argued before, the best way to do this is focus on automating operational decisions, use business rules as the platform for this and then use executable predictive analytic models to inject the insight. After all, performance management is more than performance monitoring.

"Information agility"

I would say "decision agility". It is not enough to change the information you are providing, you must ensure that your organizations changes the decisions it makes in response. As most modern organizations are their information systems, this means being able to change the way those systems make decisions - decision management. The use of business rules in designing decision services within your SOA is critical to this, just as a service-oriented BI infrastructure is important to making sure your business people change their decisions.

"delivering information quickly is good"

But deciding quickly is better. I don't believe that those who know first, win. It is necessary to decide first, to act first, to win. So automate those decisions in a way that let's your systems and process make the right decisions before your competitors do.

Technorati Tags: automated decision making, business agility, business intelligence, EDM, enterprise decision management, performance management, service-oriented architecture, Smart (Enough) Systems, smartenoughsystems, SOA