James Taylor's Decision Management

George Barlow of Appian had an article this week on How Real Time Analytics Delivers Significantly Better BPM. George and I are clearly strongly aligned on this - what he talks about in the article is exactly the kind of decision making Neil and I discuss in Smart (Enough) Systems - so I won't repeat too much except to highlight a few quotes:

With real-time capability, analytics can actually drive process flow. Analytics can be used to automatically initiate performance-based events and dynamically manage the flow of enterprise processes

Analytics can also be used to drive personalization into processes by making the decisions in the process reflect the segmentation and analysis of customers.

Real value comes when the BPM software extends to support actual business data managed by the system

Yup - just being able to analyze data about the process is not enough.

Real-time analytics achieve their true potential and are especially powerful when coupled with an integrated rules engine.

Absolutely - this combination of rules and analytics to build effective decision services within a process is how it should be done. Related posts on this topic are many and include decision technology as a platform for analytics in a process, some thoughts on intelligent business processes, how to combine BI and BPM, decision management and dynamic business applications and using decision services to marry BI and SOA.