James Taylor's Decision Management

One of my favorite topics is the use of decision management, and the creation of decision services, to marry business intelligence to SOA. I saw an interesting article by Tobin Gilman, Senior Director of BI Product Marketing at Oracle titled Integrating BI Within Your SOA
. The article made some valid points about the power of data about processes to improve those processes through things such as Business Activity Monitoring or BAM. However the focus is all on people gaining insight from data. For instance:

When a business user gains insights that flag a business performance problem, some kind of action will typically need to be taken in order to address the problem. Often, the action may involve invoking a business process. If this is difficult to achieve, then there is often less value to the insight.(my emphasis)

The trick of course is not to reply on business users gaining insights each time something happens but to capture the essence of the insight so that the system can behave correctly and automatically each time a situation occurs. instead of presenting information so that a person can say "this transaction looks suspicious", for instance, capture the rules and analytic models that will allow the system to do so automatically. This more automated approach, one of enterprise or business decision management, relies on the creation of decision services that can decide how a particular event or set of events should be handled or what next action should be taken.
Don't assume that only a person can make good decisions, your systems can too.