James Taylor's Decision Management

Last week a reference to enterprise decision management caught my eye and linked to a Special Report: Business Intelligence Gets Smart. It's a great article - Doug does a nice job as always - and it's even better as it references the book Neil Raden and I wrote last year! I believe that business intelligence, while it has a role to play, is going to struggle to "get smart" unless there are some fundamental shirts.
If we are to "spread better decision-making enterprise-wide" as the article puts it we must find new ways of making better decisions beyond dashboards and reports. The article makes the point that "BI vendors have been talking up 'pervasive BI' and 'operational BI' in recent years. Yet these buzz phrases fly in the face of ongoing complaints about their software". It is not enough to pus the same kinds of tools out to more and more people. Front-line staff use different systems and have different skills and they (and their systems) need better decisions embedded - decision management not decision support. While it may well be true that "Within three to five years, there will not be an application on the face of the planet that does not have embedded BI," (as Marge Breya, executive VP and general manager at SAP's Business Objects unit predicts) this is not the same as saying they will all have embedded dashboards or reports. Many will have embedded decisions that take advantage of the data you have rather than simply giving you access to that data. After all, as Doug says, "It's The Decisions, Stupid".