James Taylor's Decision Management

Jim Berkowitz had a post on event-based marketing that led me to this piece by BJ Morgan from Unica. The posts talk about the need to monitor individual customer behavior, the ability to explicitly take time into account, openness, ease of use, and speed. The value of decision management in delivering event-based marketing is pretty compelling:

• You must make a decision that is focused on a single customer and do so often. This means lots of micro-decisions and so implies both automation and ongoing management of those decisions.
• Data mining and predictive analytic techniques are ideal for turning time-based data into usable information - they turn uncertainty about the future into probabilities allowing you to act despite the uncertainty.
• Deployment of decisions as Decision Services helps ensure that multiple channels and systems can deliver the same decision, improving openness
• The use of business rules to manage decision logic makes it possible for business users to manage the details of the marketing decision, crucial to ease of use
• Automation of decisions means they can be made in a very short time, crucial in any event-based approach.