JT on EDM

Ed Garry of Oracle wrote a piece for Wall Street and Technology called Analytics Help Firms Turn Data Into Opportunity that I found last week. In it Ed talks about Real Time Decisioning platforms that “deliver both rules and predictive analytics to power solutions for real-time enterprise decision management”. Ed is, of course, correct though I would add adaptive control to the list of core capabilities needed for real time EDM.

Ed makes lots of good points in the article although he says one thing that might surprise readers of this blog. He says “A central component of enterprise decision management is communicating with sales targets based on their preferences”. Well, clearly enterprise decision management is not only about sales and marketing but even when you consider EDM only in that context it might seem strange to describe preferences as a central component. But think about it for a moment and it makes sense – preferences on the part of a customer or prospect are rules about how they want to be treated. Managing these rules along with the rules that are driven by regulation or policy or mined from your data makes perfect sense. While I am not sure I would describe it as a “central” component it is clearly important as I have said before when discussing personalization.