Decision-centric business improvement

My buddies over at Big Sky Thinking had a great post today - Why Optimizing Decisions is the Most Important Thing You Can Do, Part II. They lay out a great, if simple, process for focusing in on the decisions that matter. Obviously, for those of you applying enterprise decision management or EDM to improve your business you are going to want to find the decisions that are both critical to your business performance and suitable for decision automation and management. I have blogged about this before (when discussing an interesting Tom Davenport paper) but EDM is particularly effective for improving:

• High volume, rapid turnaround or even real-time decisions
• Decisions that drive straight through processing of transactions
• Decisions where there is uncertainty about what the best decision is that might be clarified with analytics
• Decisions with lots of rules, rules that change often or rules that are complex in their interactions
• Decisions that must be automated to handle the volumes involved but which the business wants to control
• Fraud and risk-based decisions
• Customer-centric treatment decisions

Well, you get the picture. I am looking forward to the next post from the Big Sky folks on how to optimize these decisions!

Technorati Tags: analytic application, analytics, business rules, competing on analytics, customer decisions, decision service, EDM, enterprise decision management, micro decisions, optimization, predictive analytics, STP, Straight Through Processing, decision-centric, Tom Davenport