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March 25, 2008

Many business trends lead to EDM

(Posed by guest blogger, James Taylor)

Mike Schaffner had an interesting post this week on 8 Business Technology Trends. I was struck by the power of Enterprise Decision Management to deliver on the promise of no less than half of them. Here are the critical ones, along with my thoughts on applying EDM to them:

Extracting more value from interactions
EDM adds value by automating less value-add activities and focusing (expensive) people on more creative and skilled areas of a business. Interactions are decision intensive so a focus on decisions and on the ongoing improvement of those decisions is critical.
Expanding the frontiers of automation
Using EDM to automate decisions, and manage change in those decisions, businesses can increase the quantity of automation and improve straight through processing with smarter processing. Businesses can also improve the quality of automation by pushing decision automation into channels like the web, ATMs, kiosks and self-service applications. While these channels are automated now, because there is no way to include people in them, they are often automated very poorly sacrificing customer service in the name of cost reduction. EDM can fix that.
Putting more science into management
While data mining and predictive analytic techniques can be used to help improve the understanding of a business and its market at a conceptual or strategic level, the real benefit from putting science into management and making decisions based on data comes when they are applied to operational decisions. EDM, with its ruthless focus on these kinds of decisions, is the best way to put science not just into management but into day to day operations and customer-facing transactions, where it is really needed.
Making businesses from information
Data may be a basis for a business but decisions are a better one. An organization that, for instance, provides data about consumers is not going to be as profitable as one that tells you what kinds of offers will be compelling to particular consumers. The decision is worth much more than the data.

EDM delivers value in your day to day operations, the drivers for it are well established and the approach of using business rules and analytics to automate and improve operational decisions proven. All roads may have led to Rome but many business trends lead to EDM.