James Taylor's Decision Management

This post caught my eye last week - ecommerceinsights.com Blog » Automated recommendations: ubiquitous in 2009?

Predictive merchandising becomes ubiquitous, and the crowd begins to separate. "Predictive merchandising" is also referred to as "automated merchandising" or "personalized product recommendations". Whatever term you like (or are marketing) we will see this area are the "product reviews of 2007", where we go from stepped up interest and demand to a default feature.

What's interesting about this is both that this requires what I call extreme personalization where every recommendation is uniquely targeted to an individual and that it is often a first decision management project for companies.The first is just a favorite topic of mine while the second is a consequence of the need to make recommendations across channels and across third parties who act on your behalf - agents or distributors, for instance. This means the decision cannot just be improved, it must be managed and externalized so it can be reused and treated as a corporate asset - the essence of decision management. While the drive for this comes from marketing and the first attempts might be in campaign management systems, ultimately it needs to become a corporate business decision. Decision Management.
Of course there are other marketing decisions that can use predictive analytics too.