James Taylor's Decision Management

I was thinking about how you can get a competitive advantage from your data and how well traditional tools for analyzing your data fit.

Let's think about it . First you must act differently to get a competitive advantage. Therefore you cannot just understand something better, you must act more effectively. This means you must make decisions differently and that means applying rules and constraints to the insight you get from your data because the real world imposes regulations, policies and constraints.

If you are going to change the way you act it is not enough to improve your reporting on the past, you must also improve your ability to predict the future. This means using predictive analytics not passive reporting or analysis tools.

Increasingly, for companies of any size, your systems are your business - you cannot do without them. Therefore these predictions and rules must go into your systems - your operational systems. Finally, of course, nothing is static so you must constantly challenge and assess the effectiveness of decisions

Given all this, then, traditional BI tools are not, perhaps, the best way to get competitive advantage. Instead, Enterprise Decision Management (EDM), or Business Decision Management as it is sometimes known, is the approach you need - it's an approach for automating and improving high-volume operational decisions. Focusing on operational decisions, it develops decision services using business rules to automate those decisions, adds analytic insight to these services using predictive analytics and allows for the ongoing improvement of decision-making through adaptive control and optimization.

Prompted, in part, by Nathan Jones' post on Using BI to gain a competitive edge