Nice article on EDM

Joe McKendrick wrote a nice article on how EDM give companies a competitive edge for the Teradata Magazine this month. Joe did a nice job, as usual, of bringing out some key points and quoting me. My two favorite quotes were:

In addition, it’s inherently difficult to build actionable intelligence into most existing applications. “Enterprise applications don’t focus c…

In addition, it’s inherently difficult to build actionable intelligence into most existing applications. “Enterprise applications don’t focus coherently on decisions and don’t enable the decisions they do automate to be managed effectively,”

The role of EDM is often to provide guidance to operational decision makers—not issue a single hard-and-fast decision, Taylor adds. This is an advance from BI systems that, up until now, essentially dumped a lot of information in users’ laps, saying, “Here’s the information, go figure out what to do,” according to Taylor. An effective EDM solution will offer viable alternatives based on available data and mapped against business rules. “It may say to a rep, ‘Here are the three things that are OK for you to do. Do any of them—it doesn’t matter which one you do, but do one of them.’”

Anyway, I strongly recommend the article and, if you like it, would suggest you buy the book Neil and I wrote for full coverage of EDM – Smart (Enough) Systems.