Decision management and the top 4 concerns of CIOs

Copyright © 2009 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Decision management and the top 4 concerns of CIOs.

Syndicated from ebizQ

I was reading an article on The top 10 CIO concerns and I was struck by the first four:

1. Business productivity and cost reduction
2. IT and business alignment
3. Business agility and speed to market
4. Business process re-engineering

It seemed to me, reading this list, that all four of these were concerns that could be addressed by the use of decision management.

More Read

Some thoughts on rules, decisions, agility and more

Social Media: The Great Equalizer

Interview with Scott Berkun, Author of Confessions of a Public Speaker

Operational decision making as a corporate asset

Four and a Half Types of NoSQL Databases, and When to Use Them

1. Applying decision management allows more decisions to be automated. This improves business productivity by allowing those who used to spend their time making operational decisions to spend that time, instead, on higher-value tasks. Instead, for instance, of rubber-stamping every policy that comes in they can spend their time on the tricky ones. Automated decision-making saves time and money over manual processes both in terms of staff time and often in terms of fees for data – automated systems regularly show a return by only paying for external data or inspections when they will make a difference.
2. Business rules, a core technology for decision management, is ideal for bringing business and IT staff together to collaborate on the behavior of their system. Dramatically reducing the number of degrees of separation between developers and business people, a business rules driven approach helps drive business alignment.
3. The same approach and technology dramatically improves agility. With business users able to make changes directly and effective, declarative technology to implement business logic companies can have systems that are easy to change and intensely agile.
4. The power of decisioning to make processes simpler, smarter and more agile is real. Companies that adopt decision management in parallel with process management develop processes that are more streamlined, easier to evolve and more optimized. If you want to re-engineer a process, integrate decisioning.

There are, of course, other benefits to decision management, but I was struck by the degree to which decision management was relevant to the top 4 concerns listed.