James Taylor's Decision Management

I was perusing some Gartner Group "Hype Cycles" this week and noticed that the core technologies for decision management are climbing the slope to the plateau of productivity:

• Data Mining Workbenches, suitable for analytically deriving rules or building predictive models, show high benefits and have an established track record of success
• Business Rule Engines, the core technology for supporting and executing business rules, are considered to be entering the plateau of productivity and also show high benefit

I particularly like Dave McCoy's comment about the value of business rules in the "decision points" of critical business processes. Combine this idea of decision points with SOA and you get decision services, a favorite topic here on the blog. Dave talks about the value of business user rule maintenance (which has some secrets but is enabled by business rules technology) but does not being out the value of integrating data mining/predictive analytics with rules - something I think is becoming more and more mainstream these days. Anyway, nice to see both technologies proving themselves.

For more reading, check out the hype cycles themselves (Gartner subscription required) - Hype Cycle for Business Process Management, 2007 and Hype Cycle for Business Intelligence and Performance Management, 2007 - and perhaps this blog post on intelligent process automation and this one on rules and processes. This one discussing how decision technologies support Gartner's view of agility might also be worth reading if you missed it originally.

Technorati Tags: agility, BRMS, business rules, data mining, decision management, Gartner, predictive analytics, BRE