All in the family not yet at the table: Building Business Capability (BBC) conference missed the opportunity to bring together Analytics and Rules

While this year’s Business Rules Forum conference broadened its scope to a more comprehensive “business agility” focus (and formally added the Business Process Forum to the mix), it came up short by failing to properly integrate Analytics.  Sure, the Predictive Analytics World conference was just upstairs, but the separation was more significant than the escalator ride.  There was no cross-pollination, on the agenda or on the exhibit floor.  There was no bridging between the mostly technical Analytics crowd and the mostly non-technical Rules folks.  And in the end, it was an opportunity lost.

Why the fuss?  Well, if you consider Business Process and Business Rules to be related complementary technologies –  cousins of sorts–   then Analytics and Business Rules are brothers.  Business Rules is about automating decisions – externalizing decision logic, making it transparent, easy to analyze, easy to test, easy to change.  Analytics is what drives the quality of those decisions, using powerful algorithms to accurately predict futures and improve decisions and their business results.  Together these technologies propel leading corporations to maximize profits, even in small margin businesses, reduce risks, and to outperform the competition.  These technologies are essential components of Decision Management, and deliver higher value than Business Rules alone. 

For those who don’t want to wait for next year, where we hope the “brothers unite” in a meaningful way in the conference agenda, you can discover the power of Decision Management at www.fico.com/en/Products/DMTools/Pages/default.aspx or from industry guru James Taylor at www.jtonedm.com.

Posted by: Garth Gehlbach, Sr. Director of Product Management