Wednesday, April 15, 2009

More on Decison Management


Today is the last day of the 8 days holiday, and tomorrow - back to the office (well for one day only, since our weekend in Israel is Friday and Saturday, and Sunday is a regular working day), and I have a huge "to do" list that keeps accumulating, and a bunch of phone calls... Today, however, I have travelled with my family to Bet She'an, one of the biggest archaeological sites in Israel (around 70 KM from Haifa). The roman city was exposed and much of it has survived, as you can see in the picture above (there is much more).

Today - just a short posting as a follow up on James Taylor's posting, who is advocating for a while the notion of decision management. The following slide is copied from JT's posting and explains the difference between decision management and decision support




The difference, as shown, is between helping people to make manual decisions, which is the BI land, and make automated decisions, which is the DM land. One of the topics I am working on recently is the notion of "decision" as an abstraction which should be programmed directly by business users, and will hide a blend of technologies such as: BRMS, event processing and various kind of analytics; I believe that the next wave of computing will be centered around the ability to business users (or direct consumers) to program and the role of IT will be replaced by autonomic computing techniques -- we are not there, but this is something to expire. Event processing will play multiple roles in this setting, but I'll leave this discussion for another time -- it is late, and I want to advance in the book I am reading since tomorrow will be busy..

2 comments:

Paul Vincent said...

Hi Opher - interesting that you consider "Decision Support" to be "manual decisions" (I guess like "workflow" is "manual business processes"), if I read the above right. On the other hand, there is a class of systems where some of the decisions are passed to a human for approval (and the user chooses either the automated or some overridden decision), with others fully automated. Hence I prefer to see "decision support" as more abstract than "manual decisions" - and CEP providing information OR automated decisions for business (processes)...

Cheers

Opher Etzion said...

Hi Paul. You are right the in "decision support" there can be a recommendation that a person can apply with one click, I guess the difference is like "microflow" to "workflow", where in microflow there is not human in the loop.

Event processing can be, of course, used also in decision support systems.

cheers,

Opher