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« February 2008 | Main | April 2008 »

March 18, 2008 Lights-Out Decision Making -- Okay for 95 Percent of Transactions Perhaps the most exciting development on the horizon for business intelligence and analytics is automated decisioning, in which analytical tools are applied to real-time data streams, and actionable recommendations are sent to a rules engine for appropriate responses by other applications -- all without human intervention. Of course, moving up the ladder to from well-informed decision making by humans using intelligent dashboards and portals to automated decisioning is a huge leap for many businesses. But as much as 95% of the operational decisions to be made could eventually be done by software, says our very own James Taylor, featured in the latest industry leader Q&A in BPM Strategies magazine (registration required to view). James, formerly with Fair Isaac, is partner in Smart (Enough) Systems and has written a book by the same name. Among many things, James talked about the potential for "lights-out" decision making -- leaving it up to rules-based systems to move processes to the next step. James spoke to this: "All too often when people talk about straight-through processing, they talk as if just linking the systems will be enough. But in most of those systems, transactions must wait for people... You need to be able to make intelligent decisions when no one is there. You want to say that for, say 95% of the transactions, you can automate the decisions and in the morning a manager can review the five percent that are tricky." The impact on transaction speeds could be enormous, James said. "Business decision management injects that intelligence into the business process management framework so you can get hands-free, lights-out, straight-through processing. The data does not stop and wait for anybody to okay it. The system is smart enough to take decisions and flow most of the transactions through." Is our current generation of technologies able to accomplish such a degree of automation? James says yes. In particular, technology areas making this a reality include service oriented architecture, business process management, and business rules management. "The service oriented architecture/business process management environment -- the idea that you are assembling applications from components or services with different properties. If you identify decision services as something different -- which you need to do to make it work -- it is easier if you are already thinking about different services doing different things. The mindset that you are not building an application but you are building a bunch of services and are assembling an application makes it easier to think about decision management." Ultimately, the ability to leverage business intelligence to such a process depends on the ability to support real-time analytics, James said. "You are beginning to see a realization that traditional BI tools simply can't be applied to a real-time application," he explained. "It is not just a question of getting the performance. If you are trying to do straight-through processing, a report isn't very helpful. What data mining and operational analytics do is see what a smart person would see if they could visualize the data and turn it into something that can be executed -- a formula or a calculation or a set of rules." _____________________________________________________________________ Posted by joemckendrick in Decision Support  |  Permalink  | Comments (2)  | TrackBacks (0) March 15, 2008 Is 'Business Intelligence' Still a Relevant Term? Okay, over the years, many have joked that 'business intelligence,' like its cousin, 'military intelligence,' are oxymorons. But BI has stuck as a defining umbrella term for all the activities that pertain to the gathering of data and presentating as information of some use to decision makers -- be it through Excel or intelligent portals or dashboards. Lately, Colin White, who has been instrumental in putting the 'intelligence' into business intelligence, has questioned whether BI is still an appropriate moniker. He notes that 'business analytics' seems to be a term with more traction from a business perspective. Business users, he observes, "always seem comfortable with the term business analytics, but often view BI as a vague and imprecise technical term." Colin says that the term "operational analytics," for instance, is seen as more "dynamic" than "operational BI." True, analytics seems to have more of a hard-hitting and more focused tone to it than the more amorphous BI. And some vendors say the term BI has been getting watered down with all kinds of solutions, including simple reporting tools. Does "analytics" better define or describe the new breed of sophisticated tools and capabilities now arriving on the market? Posted by joemckendrick in BI  |  Permalink  | Comments (1)  | TrackBacks (0)