Frank Gens of IDC posted this short item on what Line of Business managers want from their CIOs and it had a nice little graph showing the key things that the business wants from IT. Of the 10 items, several seem to me to show the need for Enterprise Decision Management or EDM:
- Speed up project delivery(#1)
The use of EDM, especially the use of business rules technology to manage business logic, makes projects faster – especially if the delivery date is when the system works well not when the first version is delivered. This is boosted by the number of projects that are maintenance/update projects as business rules and externalized decisions make a huge difference in maintenance work. - Improve information access(#2)
This is an interesting one as I wonder why the line of business managers are only asking for better information access, not better decision support or management. Is it simply that they expect no more? Anyway, EDM can help with getting more value from information, even if not with access explicitly. - More innovative ideas from IT Group(#3)
Having systems handle underwriting, claims, approvals, fraud detection and much much more using EDM would seem to be pretty innovative, at least for most companies struggling under the weight of dumb enterprise applications. - Improve IT support(#5)
Given how much IT support is about making changes as and when needed, EDM’s empowerment of the business would help here too. - Bring IT costs down(#9)
EDM reduces maintenance costs dramatically by empowering the business to make many of its own changes. - Understand my business better(#10)
By externalizing and managing decisions the need for the IT department to do this goes down – the business can manage its own decisions.
I hope to go along to the IDC event later today so perhaps I’ll find Frank and ask him about these.
