I presented today at the TDWI Executive Summit in San Diego on Moving to Real-Time Analytic Decision Making with Decision Management and I thought I would post a few thoughts.
The right time to make a decision is increasingly in real time – customers want responses in real time, supply chains must adapt to disruption in real time, and fraud must be caught before it gets into the system while self-service and Web applications cannot wait for human intervention. Add to this pressure towards real-time the increased value that results from faster decision-making (as discussed in this article on decision latency) and the value of automation is clear. At the same time it is clear that there is real value in analytic, data-driven decision making. The challenge is to reconcile analytic decision-making with this time pressure and deliver real-time, analytic decision making. This is where Decision Management comes in.
As I said in my presentation,the most critical step is the first – a focus on decisions. Identifying and modeling decisions – decision discovery – is where you need to focus first. I have written quite a lot on the role of decision discovery and decision modeling including this paper on using decision modeling for predictive analytics projects. This approach addresses some of the key challenges identified by practitioners like Andrea Scarso.
Decision Management, of course, is both a technology stack and an approach. If you want more information on the technologies for this, check out the Platform Technologies Report. If you are interested in more on the Decision Management approach, check out my book Decision Management Systems.
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