James Taylor's Decision Management

Kevin Quinn wrote a nice article on The Invisible Hand of BI recently and made some great points. I also loved that phrase - the "invisible hand" of BI - because it seemed to me to be exactly what decision management offers. As Kevin said:

Most people aren't interested in firing up an ad-hoc query tool or designing a report to find information, no matter how user-friendly these tools may be.Instead, they want to receive information as part of their familiar business processes.

And he is quite right - they don't. However he goes on to say

That information should be accessible through the programs they use every day such as e-mail, search engines, write boards, web browsers, and spreadsheets, not via BI "tools" that are external to all of them

Well no, I don't think so. The information needs to be acted on in context not "accessible" at all. Of course that means you can't really use BI tools or visualizations at all - you must use analytically derived business rules and executable analytics that can be executed inline, in real-time and without user intervention. Sure, some of the information will need to come in familiar formats so they can make decisions based on it but mostly they want to know what options are allowed, what offer will be most effective, which supplier to choose for reliable delivery. They want options, suggested actions, not information.
If you really want "an invisible hand" and you want that invisible hand to be analytic then I don't think what you need is BI. Not even real-time, operational BI. What you need is decision management so that the decision making within your processes is explicit and external. After all it is not really the business process itself that triggers this kind of BI, but the critical decisions within the process.