BPM Strategies - March 2008 - (Page 16) B P M I N D U ST RY L E A D E R Q & A Decisions are Corporate Assets that Need to be Managed James Taylor is a recognized expert in business decision management. While an executive at the business rules company Fair Isaac, he developed the principles of enterprise decision management and led the company’s adoption of this new approach as its global strategy. Now, with Neil Ruden, he has established a consulting firm called Smart (Enough) Systems and written a book of the same name. BPMInstitute.org: What is the mission of Smart (Enough) Systems? Taylor: We are setting out to help organizations understand how to use technology to better automate and manage operational decisions. We are working with vendors who want to reach more customers with their technology, and with customers who are either using the technology and looking for ways to expand their adoption, or are looking at the technology and trying to understand the kind of problems it can solve. cheaper to automate. We wrote the book for the people out there who think their choice is between really dumb applications - where you put data in, it stores it for you in a database and then regurgitates it when you tell it to - and waiting for something out of a research lab. In fact, the technology exists and people know how to make systems that are not “intelligent” but are smart enough to do something useful - everything from fraud detection to whether you should give somebody credit to is somebody right for a certain kind of offer. A lot of things are done with the technology but it is not broadly understood as a class of applications. We argue that there is a class of applications that do this, that are well-defined and for which there are a lot of proof points. You don’t have to wait. It can make a real difference right now. There is a perception that the technology can be used only for a narrow set of problems and a big part of the book was to say that there was, in fact, a whole class of applications for which it can be used. So when you say “fraud detection,” people think that is what the credit card companies use. It is pigeonholed. But the case studies in the book show that the applications have a lot in common. BPMInstitute.org: So what do you call this class of applications? Taylor: When we were writing the book, it was clear that many users of these technologies don’t consider themselves as part of the same market as other users of the technologies. They all have different ways of talking about the problem and there is a whole range of problems business rules and analytics can solve. We said that there is a group of problems that they can solve together and that needs a name. In the book, we picked “enterprise decision management” but others have called it “business decision management.” You need to treat high-volume, operational decisions as an enterprise or business asset. BPMInstitute.org: You started by writing a book. Why? Taylor: We realized that there were a group of companies in different industries that had successfully automated what appear to be complex, high-volume decisions using technologies that hadn’t gotten widespread acknowledgment. We were curious about why you had all these companies struggling with extraordinarily dumb applications or with business processes that have to wait until a human is there to make a decision, when there are other companies and other decisions that had been successfully automated. BPMInstitute.org: What do you mean? Taylor: Customers respond as if every decision you make was taken deliberately. Yet the way you build your systems and your processes means that most of the decisions you take are a consequence of something else. They are not really explicitly decided for an individual - they are not “enterprise” decisions. That is what we meant by enterprise. In the context of business process management, we decided that the right way to talk about it was as business decision management - a parallel and complementary concept. We mean the same thing - focusing on operating decisions and automating and improving them over time using technology. BPMInstitute.org: Why do they? Taylor: What we realized is that all that has really changed in the last 10 years is the price/performance of hardware. The only problems that used to be automated were those that have quite a big impact decision-by-decision. Now decisions don’t have to be as valuable individually because they are much easier and 16 BPMInstitute.org: What do these enterprises have in common? Taylor: The willingness to inject enough intelligence into their system using proven technology, rather than either waiting or throwing up their hands. The use of business rules, analytics and decision services to automate decisions. BPMInstitute.org: How does this tie into the notion of straight-through processing? BPMSTRATEGIES http://BPMInstitute.org http://BPMInstitute.org http://BPMInstitute.org http://BPMInstitute.org http://BPMInstitute.org http://BPMInstitute.org http://BPMInstitute.org
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.