James Taylor's Decision Management

Ann All had an interesting post this week on her blog in which she discussed keeping people out of the BI loop. But decision management can do more than keep people out of the BI loop - it can keep people out the loop period.

Now, this may not sound like a good thing but think about it. How can a person be injected into a self-service or other web-based process? How can a person participate in a process you are trying to run "straight through"? How can a person be injected into a process that involves an ATM or kiosk? Well, of course, they cannot be. These processes require that you keep people out of the loop and to do that you must automate the kinds of decisions that people are often used for - pricing, eligibility, cross-sell, refunds etc. Automating and managing these decisions (using business rules and analytics as I regularly discuss on this and my other blog) is critical to ensuring that these automated processes run hands-free.

But there is also value to having this kind of decision automation in processes where you are able to have people. The automation can ensure that most transactions don't need staff, freeing those staff to work on the genuinely difficult ones. Automated decisions can be precise, consistent and easy to change and can re-balance the work between your information systems and your staff.