Intelligent Enterprise

At last week's Business Rules Forum, I attended James Taylor's keynote on the role of decision management in agile, smarter systems. Much of this is based on the book he co-authored with Neil Raden, Smart (Enough) Systems, which I reviewed shortly after its release.

Our systems need to be smarter because we live in a time of constant, rapid change -- regulations change; competition changes due to globalization; business models and methods change -- and businesses need to respond to this change or risk losing their competitive edge. It's not enough to be a smarter organization, however: you have to have smarter systems because of the volume and complexity of the events that drive businesses today, the need to respond in real time, and the complexity of the network of systems by which products and services are delivered to customers.

Smarter systems have four characteristics:

• They're action-oriented, making decisions and taking action on your behalf instead of just presenting information and waiting for you to decide what to do.
  
• They're flexible, allowing corrections and changes to be made by business people in a short period of time.
  
• They're forward-looking, being able to use historic events and data to predict likely events in the future, and respond to them proactively.
  
• They learn, based on testing combinations of business decisions and actions in order to detect patterns and determine the optimal parameters (for example, testing pricing models to maximize revenue).

James had a number of great examples of smarter systems in practice, and wrapped up with the key to smarter systems: have a management focus on decisions, find the decisions that make a difference to your business, externalize those decisions from other systems, and put the processes in place to automate those decisions and their actions.

To subscribe to the weekly Intelligent Enterprise newsletters, click here.

E-MAIL | FOLLOW US