It can sometimes be lonely being a proponent of a big new idea like decision management. It is delightful, then, when you find out that you are less alone than you expected. Last week I came across a couple of white papers from Ventana Research – Extending BI to Support Operational Decision Management and Improving Operational Performance through Decision Management. The first of these has a great paragraph that summarizes one of the major challenges I see in this space (my emphasis):
While many examples of deployed automated decision systems exist, many business managers still do not fully understand or trust them. This is partly because of commonly held but narrow definitions of BI, and partly because of a lack of understanding of how to deploy automated decision making systems.
Mark nails this one – the narrow definition of BI as a way to deliver information to people (presumably so those people can make better decisions) makes it hard for “BI people” to see the power of decision management. This was the prompt for my post To Hell with Business Intelligence, try Decision Management and my article First Steps To and Beyond Operational Business Intelligence. Mark also lists some characteristics of organizations/decisions that will benefit from the decision management approach. Both papers are worth checking out.
If you want a thorough exploration of the whole topic, check out the book I wrote with Neil Raden Smart (Enough) Systems – you can buy it from amazon.com.
