James Taylor's Decision Management

Keith posted an interesting piece today on The knowledge bus and Human Rules Management based on a conversation he had with my old friend Jim Sinur. As usual there were some good thoughts in Keith's piece but I do want to take issue with one of his early statements. Unlike Keith, and perhaps Jim, I don't believe that the focus is going to shift "from server-side application automation to client-side human interaction". I do agree that far more focus is needed on human interactions, especially around supporting collaboration. However, I also believe that more automation of interactions is also inevitable, especially between companies and their customers. Self-service is not going away and customers expect more and more options on the web, on their mobile devices etc. These options cannot always include people so server-side automation of these interactions will be critical. This drives the need to automate decisions and to make it more effective for staff to handle and process exceptions and more complex cases. Thus the interactions that are handled by people are more complex, driving a focus on the interactions and on collaboration, but that's not because server-side automation declines in importance.

I did like a comment later in the post:

Looking forward, it may be that we will see a convergence of Business Rule Management and technology support for knowledge work