James Taylor's Decision Management

Mike Kavitz had a nice post last week - Business Processes as a competitive advantage - in which he discussed the problems he experienced with US Air. The first of these, that of missing a connection due a delay, he felt could have been fixed by a better organized airline. He should have been flying Continental. In a session at the recent DAMA conference, Stephen Brobst of Teradata talked about a system to handle this exact situation. I blogged about this here and here's what I said about Continental:

Their flight management dashboard tracks near real-time events (every minute) and stores them in data warehouse which then drives a dashboard for a hub showing "red zone" flights - more than 15 minute delay. For each flight showed map of flight arrivals, how long the connections had and how many of the people trying to make each flight were profitable customers v less profitable. Delivered to the director of operations so they could do their best to fix things e.g. by providing a cart to make the connection work. Use of information is critical - timeliness - but also had to make people/organizational changes to ACT on the data.

This kind of system is exactly what Mike needed - a process to handle the situation, for sure, but also good decision automation and management too.
As for Mike's other problems with US Air I think they are largely process ones, as he notes. Some of them could have been improved by integrating better decision management but only really if the willingness to change the process was there.