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My old friend John Parkinson had a nice post over on CIO Insights today - 5 Challenges to Integrating IT and Business. As usual John makes good points about the challenges of technology in general but four of his five made me think about the challenges and opportunities of decision management technologies in particular:

• No clean slate
  Adopting SOA, BPM or any other new approach always runs a risk of crashing squarely into the realities of a body of legacy systems and technology. One of the most interesting ways I see organizations adopting decision management is in taking the highly volatile pieces of legacy systems - typically decision making pieces - and externalizing them using rules and other techniques. This allows them to be reused in other parts of the business, and they are often valuable widely, while leaving most of the legacy application intact and ensuring that the highly volatile piece is now easier to manage.
• Unrealistic expectations
  While it might not be obvious what decision management technology can do about this, I think it is relevant that by bringing the business more directly into the process of managing and updating information systems it can reduce unrealistic expectations. Business users who are doing their own rule writing and testing will have more of an understanding of the realities of technology.
• Out of synch strategies
  The power of decision management to synchronize the business and IT by bringing both sets of skills to bear on the same business problem. Using business rules to allow business and IT to collaborate is well established and can reduce the gap between the organizations.
• Nothing stays the same
  Agility, agility, agility. One of if not the defining characteristic of decision management technologies is their ability to bring agility to information systems. Making it easier to tell what change is needed and easier to make the change quickly and yet correctly is both essential and a direct benefit of these technologies.

You might enjoy this post on agility and this one on business user / IT collaboration. May you live in interesting times...

Posted by jtaylor in Business Agility • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Legacy Modernization |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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Comments

John pointed out a longer version of his article here
JT

Posted by: James Taylor at December 13, 2007 11:14 AM

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