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Mike Kavitz had an interesting post on Integrating BI and SOA that made me think about BI in SOA. Personally I have never much liked discussing BI in SOA as BI's focus on reporting and presentation to people seemed a more fit for SOA's focus on interconnected services with well-defined interfaces. Mike's post was nicely done, though, and made me see his point of view clearly. His platform nicely externalizes and manages the business rules as well as the data and business intelligence services. If, instead of a business rules layer, he had a decision management layer I think he would be in even better shape. Instead of separating out decision making and saying that business rules OR business intelligence can be used, a decision management layer would support the use of data, information and rules in whatever combination made sense. Thus some decisions would be completely automated using rules and executable predictive analytic models, some would be automated using rules derived from data mining, others would be supported using reports and rules in combination to make suggestions while others would be left entirely to people with BI being used to support them. Lots of flexibility, a nice focus on decisions and even more value from integrating BI and SOA.

Posted by jtaylor in Business Intelligence |Digg This|Add to del.icio.us

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