One of the key aspects of decision management is a focus on taking action using insight gained from data – not just showing someone the data (BI) or just letting them create or update it (enterprise apps). Identifying the decisions that drive the behavior of your employees is crucial. If the mobile employee is a claims agent then the decisions that matter are ones like “is this claim fraudulent”. If the mobile employee is an account manager then the decisions that matter are thinks like “is this prospect entitled to a credit account”, “will this account get these products in time”, “what’s the best upsell or cross-sell for this account” and so on.

If you focus on managing and automating these decisions then you can use the information the phone has (position), insight from the data the company has (fraud likelihood of this claim based on analysis of similar claims, predicted wait times for a product delivery based on analysis of the supply chain, propensity to buy of the account for highest margin products based on analysis of similar accounts and products) to take an action (tell the person using the phone to do or not do something).

I don’t see traditional BI vendors having much to offer here – the whole reporting/OLAP infrastructure they have developed is predicated on knowledge workers doing analysis. If you want to take advantage of mobile devices you need to think about automating decisions for the person holding the device. For instance:

• Use mobile phones held by maintenance engineers to track their location and then use analytics to predict which pieces of equipment are most likely to fail soon and rules to assign the nearest, qualified engineer before sending the directions on where to go to the engineers phone.
  • Don’t show them reliability graphs or travel times, tell them where to go to make best use of their time
• Use the mobile phone of a real estate appraiser to find out which risk zones a property is in and what the predicted difference is between a house inside and outside that risk zone
  • Don’t show them a picture of the risk zones
• Use a doctor’s mobile phone to route them to the most useful hospital during an emergency based on predictions of patient load, the hospitals they know and their specialties
  • Don’t show them graphs of wait times and pie charts of specialties needed
• Use a customer’s mobile phone to make them an offer at a store that is nearby having predicted that they are likely to buy it, checked that is in stock there and estimated that they are more likely to respond in person than to an email promotion to the website

And so on. Automate decisions and use mobile devices to provide context for those decisions and to deliver decisions to people out and about. Don’t send them reports. Please.

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Decision-centric organizations deliver agility because they can make rapid changes to the way they conduct business. Decisions are the changeable elements of most operations and rapidly changing policy or regulation and competitive pressures affect these decisions, not the processes or functions within which they are made. Decision-centric organizations deliver the business control executives want over operations by giving them control over the decisions that drive day to day operations and implement business strategy. These decisions are compliant, and demonstrably so, because those who understand the regulations are driving the decision with no IT/business disconnect.

A decision-centric organization maximizes straight through processing, delivers consumer- and information-driven processes that are infinitely customizable and that flow easily from automation to case management and back again. Decision-centric organizations gain operational advantages and a competitive edge through a systematic focus on decision making throughout the organization. Decision-centric organizations deliver increased agility by decoupling the IT and business lifecycles and it dramatically reduces the complexity of IT and hence its cost.

Decisions have always been at the core of an organization’s behavior but for too long they have been buried, considered only as part of an organizational function or a business process. Such buried decisions are rarely automated effectively, are hard to improve and the lack of explicit management of these decisions leaves organizations at a loss to know how to maximize their effectiveness.

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• Consumerization
  Not just technology but can deliver business processes as services using the Internet
• Commoditization
• Virtualization
  Not just of hardware but of processes and teams
• Globalization

In this environment, processes are a key competitive advantage – much more than many elements of IT (thanks to commoditization). Challenges include showing a single view of my business, optimizing allocation of scarce resources and flexing operations while remaining compliant. Efficiency stems from predictability but rigidity is a real problem.

Today, most companies have duplication of activities and processes, everything is locked away in old environments and it is difficult to outsource or to manage anything but the basic processes. Reengineering processes created a “to be” vision but implementing and customizing ERP delivered, at best, a compromise between the as-is and to-be visions and did so far too long after the original design was made. The time to innovate IT infrastructure (many years), creates friction with the much more rapidly changing business strategy and organization. To reduce the friction you need a process-centric “business operations platform” that builds on the back-end you already have. The idea of managing change in a layer above the back-end systems is one with which I agree but I think decisions are as important as processes in this respect.

The business operations platform, in their mind, uses a Business Process Management Suite (BPMS) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM). These consume services for business logic, master data management, business rules and more and are layered over a corporate data backbone. The need to extract business rules (decisions) from processes is critical to keeping processes simple enough to bring business users into this process. In addition, third party web service integration and user-driven mashups are required and the whole thing needs to run reliably and scalably.

Processes, while important, are not the end of the road. Well designed business services that make up a process help eliminate complex processes, keep my processes “skinny” and allow for more reuse. Reuse involves understanding KPIs, service-level agreements and metadata for business services. A business operations platform therefore allows:

• Construction of processes from reusable business services
• Share processes and services internall and externally
• Build and sell services
• Build processes dynamically as needed
• Work in an on demand environment

The final state is one where you:

• Are proactive not reactive
• Have a seamless environment
• Link and share systems and resources
• Have very “skinny” processes
• Manage exceptions dynamically
• Have full visibility and status of the supply and demand chain

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