James Taylor's Decision Management

I was at the Gartner BPM conference last week and I was struck by the degree to which business rules, and decisioning, were top of mind for many of the attendees. The power of advanced decisioning to make processes simpler, more agile and smarter came up again and again. The effective application of business rules and advanced analytics, and the management of decisions in concert with processes ensure a separation of concerns and a more effective process. Specifically, combining process management and advanced decisioning will decrease process complexity and increase straight through processing, increase agility and business user engagement and create opportunities to apply “smarts”.

• Decrease process complexity
  Dynamic processes can be overly complex with multiple paths and complex routing. Extracting the decision and putting it first creates a dynamic process—one driven by the specific customer, case or transaction—without increasing process complexity. Explicit decision handling also increases the rate of straight through processing (STP) and reduces the number of processes that wait while items are put on worklists or in queues. This marriage of explicit decisions and process management keeps transactions moving with only exceptions ending up on worklists. Staff can then focus on higher value activities.
• Increase agility and engagement
  Business users like process management software because it allows them to change their workflow easily. Advanced Decisioning takes this flexibility to the next step, because business changes often involve changes to business decisions—to pricing, eligibility or risk assessment decisions, for example. Adding advanced decisioning allows business users to control processes and the critical decisions within them.
• Opportunities to Apply Smarts
  Applying analytics is a major focus for many organizations. The power of analytics lies in making better decisions. Advanced decisioning allows analytics to be applied to data about process execution and data about customer behavior. Advanced decisioning puts these analytics to work embedding more precise, more profitable decisions in your business processes.

If you want to know more about how to apply advanced decisioning to achieve process excellence you can view this recorded webinar or download the brief on this topic.

Here's the set of posts I wrote:

1. BPM Optimization and Simulation
2. Bare essentials of making rules work
3. Survive, thrive and capitalize with BPM
4. Advanced decisioning for process excellence
5. Business Agility Now!
6. Dynamic BPM and agility
7. Business Rules Management – the misunderstood partner to process
8. Enhancing BPM with Business Rules and Analytics at Air Products