James Taylor's Decision Management

David Chassells had an interesting article last week called BPM and SOA: Where IT Is Going if Real People Take It There In which he quotes George Colony (founder of Forrester Research):

"If we don't get from IT (Information Technology) to BT (Business Technology) we're going to have more disasters like our present mortgage meltdown. Why? Because IT creates impenetrable systems that human beings can't manage. BT is about human beings back in control"

David goes on to talk about Business Logic (including BPM) and Delivery Technologies (where SOA plays).
Now, I have some disagreements with David's points later in the article - business logic does change, and change continuously - but the article made me think about what I see as the key elements in moving from IT to BT.

• Business control
  Of how the systems that run the business actually behave on a day to day basis
• Business agility
  Removing IT impedance from change
• Business intelligence
  Not in the sense of reports and dashboards but in the sense of running the business intelligently

I see decision management at the core of all three and thought that, this week, I would write about each. First Business Control.
Business control is about allowing business owners to determine how the systems that run the business actually behave on a day to day basis - to control their own destiny by controlling the systems that run the business. Realistically this means ensuring that those elements of the systems that require business know-how to understand or that the business may want to change in a hurry, in response to legislation or market conditions etc must be exposed to non-technical business owners in a way that lets them understand what the systems are doing, validate that this is correct, simulate the impact of a change and ultimately make a change. For most business processes the process itself does not change much - order to cash is order to cash. In these processes the decisions within the process must be exposed so that the business can control these elements of the process. Examples would be risk assessment, pricing, cross-sell/up-sell, refund and so on. In more dynamic/flexible processes the process itself needs to be similarly exposed.
Decision management - externalizing operational decisions from the systems and processes that need them and exposing them to business users in a familiar and accessible format (business rules, say) is a critical element in moving to business technology.