If 5% of business is unique, is it all decisioning?

Shai Agassi recently presented on SAP's roadmap and one of his key points was how much of business was common. As CRMchump said:

“"Dive strategic differentiation" got a bit more play from Agassi, who interestingly claimed that "more than 95 percent of business is common across all companies, in all industries." This five percent difference is what provides the strategic differentiation that should be exploited, and ultimately run on an SOA system.

I completely agree with Shai on this one (or should I say he completely agrees with me). Take a typical business process and almost every step has a best practice and/or template. In fact the rush to commoditized business processes is something about which I have written before. However the way take decisions within that process is unique to you. It also remains the only way I know to truly differentiate outsourced processes. So what makes decisions unique to you?

• Customer segmentation is based on your data and your profiles
• Your policies and procedures are unique, even if they build on regulations and external rules
• The data that drives personalization is yours and the insight from that data cannot be duplicated by someone else
• Your business users have their own experience and that experience uniquely informs the rules they write, the way they treat customers etc.

So is the whole of the 5% decisions? Who knows. But decisions are certainly not common across companies and so automating and improving them using enterprise decision management to bring your rules and your analytic insights to bear will give you strategic differentiation.