James Taylor, who covers Decision Management here on eBizq.net, did an exceptional job in adding value to my post on "Predictive BI."
"I distinguish between BI and Decision Management because BI helps you understand your business while Decision Management helps you execute business. If BI is the bridge between your data and your strategies, DM is the bridge between your strategies and your operations."
My approach is really about marring the two worlds. Indeed, because one can't exist without the other. I see the world converging over the next few years, around the reality that you can't make decisions without predictive information, and there is no need to have predictive information if you can't use it to make decisions.
"And this leads back to my point about Decision Management. If a predictive analytic model turns uncertainty about how a particular customer (or supplier or partner) will behave in the future into a usable probability then you can act based in part on that probability. In other words you can specify some rules that use the probability in deciding what action to take next. This kind of 'intelligent' decision-making by systems is, I believe, the future."
Exactly!
Considering that we're gathering the historical data that we need, and doing the predictive analysis that we need to do on that data, we're clearly heading for a day when not only will we be able to make automated tactical decisions, such as when to order more of a raw material to manufacture a product, but longer term and further reaching decisions as well, as James outlines. I look to a future where the business systems will make most of the core business decisions, perhaps faster and better than I can, and allow me to think about the larger issues that make or break a business.
If this thinking if not strategic to your IT, it should be.
Even though James Taylor and I wrote a book together about Decision Management, I disagree with his assessment of BI. First of all, Decision Management is only a concept that is thinly adopted in industry. In our year or two of working together, I found only a handful of industries interested in it, and they mostly had already adopted it, with or without the architecture we proposed.
Decision Management is limited to only a certain class of decisions, most of which involve customer contact. The vast majority of decisions in organizations still require some human intelligence in the loop. BI should full that role, though in fairness, it hasn't done a very good job yet.
The recent crop of analytical databases as well as the embedding of more analytical and real-time capabilities in existing ones sets the stage for BI to become more actionable, with or without a human actuator.
One last thing: Decision Management as James describes it requires a very substantial investment in data management before any real work can begin. So even in those cases Decision Management is the right approach, BI is an integral part of the solution.
-Neil Raden
Hired Brains