Enterprise Decision Management and important IT trends

I saw this article in Baseline - The 30 Most Important IT Trends for 2007 - and it struck me how many of them pointed out the need for an enterprise decision management approach. Highlights included:

• Needing to focus on improving customer-facing process and the customer experience
• Making better use of information - moving beyond Business Intelligence to predictive analytics and data mining
• A more holistic approach to compliance and risk management
• A need for agility and innovation, especially at the intersection of IT and the business
• SOA is coming to dominate architectural decisions

Enjoy.

Here's the complete list with comments and links

1. Process improvement will be job No. 1
   The survey showed lots of work around process change and a vision for much more automation across the board. Decision automation is going to be important to drive the levels of automation being targeted.
2. IT works on closing the sale
   There seems to be lots of focus on customer acquisition and exploitation. Interestingly there was broad agreement (65%) that using the Internet allowed companies to reach niche markets, pointing to the value of segmentation.
3. Companies make their Web sites more engaging
4. Customer service gets a tune-up
   Analyzing behavior to build predictive models, providing self service, being consistent across channels, personalization and segmentation all up year over eyar, as is collecting customer feedback
5. Companies put their mounds of data to work
   Making better use of data is considered key (#3) and most IT folks think they are both effective at using data (75%) and that they have users who complain can't get data they need (55%). I think this mismatch comes from a failure to focus on actions/recommendations rather than data. In addition, the need to move to more event-driven, Business Activity Monitoring solutions means you need decision management as routing rules and event rules are not the same as decision rules.
6. Information governance gains momentum
7. CIOs strive to be strategic
   I think decision technology can be a crucial driver for operationalizing strategy.
8. The division between IT and business will diminish
   Only, I suspect, if the right technologies are adopted to close the gap.
9. CIO compensation keeps climbing
10. IT organizations will keep growing
11. CIOs struggle to find business-savvy technologists
    This points up the need for "Purple People"
12. Outsourcing changes IT management
13. Outsourcing growth slows
    I think companies underestimate their ability to outsource business processes and still control their business and ignore the fact that they can resist the commoditization of processes using business rules.
14. Offshoring shifts from India
15. Companies invest in IT leadership
16. Demonstrating ROI will remain a struggle
    I think showing an ROI from Business Intelligence is particularly difficult.
17. No abatement of IT security threats
18. Security concerns turn users away from Windows
19. Security morphs into risk management
    One of the examples was the risk to data when employees leave but the data they have is not the only issue.
20. Compliance achieves what government intended
    A holistic approach to compliance has better results, for instance a combination of rules and process automation works well for compliance
21. Compliance spurs financial process improvement
22. The move to a new architecture marches on
    SOA is in and business rules and decision services complement it.
23. Enterprise applications start losing their luster
    Will SOA kill the big application vendor suites or not?
24. Data quality demands attention
25. IT reluctantly embraces Web 2.0
26. IT innovation loses traction
    I think there is more innovation opportunity if IT departments can eliminate their maintenance backlog and focus on developing new, agile systems.
27. Business process management services and software will frustrate users
    Remember Business Rules Management and Business Process Management are complementary but not the same.
28. For business intelligence, the best is yet to come
    But only if they move from collecting data to using it
29. IT organizations start going green
30. Dissatisfaction with vendors is on the rise

Technorati Tags: Baseline, BPMS, business agility, business intelligence, business process management, business rules, CIO, compliance, customer experience, decision service, predictive analytics, risk management, ROI, SOA, Tag 16, Trends