James Taylor's Decision Management

This report from Aberdeen is available on ebizQ this week - Aligning IT to Business Processes: How BPM is Complementing ERP - and it covers how IT and business groups can use Business Process Management to complement ERP and other Enterprise Applications. The report discusses the widespread concern in companies over the lack of ROI in their ERP projects and has a number of interesting statistics. For instance, only 15% say their ERP systems offer the flexibility they need while over half say they must perform manual steps to get things done. The report goes on to describe how companies are using business process management (BPM), SOA and web services to fix some of these problems. In particular it discusses how companies feel BPM gives them more agility, improves speed of implementation and gives business more control.
While I don't disagree with any of these, I do think that decision management is also important when thinking about how to maximize the value of existing enterprise applications. I have blogged before on why agility needs process and decision agility and of the role of decision management in composite applications and what Forrester calls Dynamic Business Applications. Building decision services and making these part of the new composite applications and agile business processes is important too. Interestingly more than half the responders to the report said said that "key application parameters and rules are locked in program source code, making changes difficult" - a clear cut case for decision management if ever I heard one.
Check out my guest post over on Vinnie's blog too on Raising your enterprise application IQ