James Taylor's Decision Management

One of the main reasons companies adopt decision management and the associated technologies is to empower business users. Joe posted on this topic recently and it made me think about business empowerment. To empower the business from a systems perspective means putting them in a position to direct how their systems work, how they support the business, how they change. It seems to me that this requires 4 things - information, understanding, control and simulation.

• Information about the business
  Business users who can't get reports, dashboards and visualizations that present information about what is happening, what is working, what is delayed, what is broken are not going to be able to take any control of their systems - they won't know where to start. One of the reasons now is a good time for decision management is that many organizations have now reached this point.
• Understanding of their systems and processes
  Business users must be able to see how their processes run today, what data is stored when and how the systems that support the process work. If the process and business logic are embedded in code then this will not happen. The use of business process technology and of business rules can make all the difference in the world.
• Control of the systems
  If business users cannot change their systems, if they are not the ultimate arbiters of what process runs or what rules are executed to make a particular decision then they cannot be said to be empowered. Control need not mean sole control - the IT department can be involved too - but the way the process and rules are defined must allow the business users to really control things.
• Simulation of proposed changes
  Business users are not going to go through the same kind of formal QA and testing process IT uses so they must be able to simulate the impact of changes in a way that makes sense to them. They must understand what a change will do before they do it.