Using Decision Management to avoid pointless and reckless

John Boyd, author of the OODA Loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act) once said

Decisions without actions are pointless. Actions without decisions are reckless

This seems to me to be a clarion call for Decision Management and its combination of operational and analytic systems into Decision Management Systems:

• A typical analytic system, a Business Intelligence or dashboard system for instance, supports someone to make data-driven decisions but cannot take actions as a consequence – that must be done in an operational system. Pointless.
• A typical operational system takes actions but does not make decisions. It may send emails, display content, calculate prices but it generally does so mechanically or in response to an external (user) prompt. It has no way to ensure that a data-driven, properly structured decision was made. Reckless.

So BI can result in pointless decisions without actions while traditional transactional systems result in reckless actions without decisions.

Decision Management Systems deliver the combination you need – analytic decisions, described in a decision requirements model and implemented using the right combination of business rules and predictive analytics, that drive real actions in an operational context.