This post originally appeared as an article in my company‘s newsletter Decision Management News (sign up here).
Business Process, Business Rules, Business Intelligence – the three “B’s” that drive much of today’s IT investment. Often considered separate domains and separate sets of technologies, each B has its own center of excellence, its own methodology, its own experts. But this Balkanization pushes apart technologies that can and should be used together.
Using these technologies separately results in over-complex processes that meander through fields of rules and over oceans of data. Changing them from IT line items to a source of business transformation requires an organizing principle and a business-centric perspective – a focus on business decisions. Business decisions play a crucial role in business processes, driving straight-through processing and simplifying workflow. Business decisions focus and organize business rules, effectively applying them to concrete business problems. Understanding the business decisions being made ensures the right business intelligence is collected and analyzed.
Decision Management – the discovery, automation and continuous improvement of decisions – ties these technologies and approaches together into a coherent framework. The separate lives of business processes, business rules and business intelligence can be transformed by the power of decisions. The power of Decision Management is simpler processes, smarter systems and an agile business.
