Navigating the Hype to Find Real Business Value

Gartner recently released their latest set of Hype Cycle reports that cover a wide range of technology trends and where they sit on the road from trigger to productivity. These reports are a great way to get an early preview of emerging technologies and track how they progress from concept to mainstream practice. New items in the 2012 report include Big Data, the Internet of Things and Strategic Business Capabilities.

Decision management is a key component of many of the trends reviewed by Gartner:

• Business Process Management – Agility continues to be a driver for BPM adoption and Business Rules Management is a primary component for delivering that agility. The BPM¹ report shows that rules are becoming more mainstream but maturity and usage is still low in most companies, which means there is still a lot of opportunity for improvement. Leading organizations are going beyond the basics to focus on adding more intelligence.

• Predictive Analytics– A key capability in the Analytic Applications² and Big Data³ Hype Cycle reports is predictive analytics. Gartner’s findings include – “…the only reason to pursue any Big Data initiatives is to deliver against a business objective”. This report goes on to say that success requires asking the right questions and using the right technologies to get the answers. Fraud detection and claims analytics are specifically pointed out as examples.

Gartner’s overarching advice is for companies to develop a better understanding of the types of decisions they are making and that unutilized business data presents a significant opportunity for improvement. Overall we think their assessment reinforces FICO’s decision management vision and our advice is that the best investment you can make is to focus on automating and improving the decisions that drive the most business value.

¹ Gartner, Hype Cycle for Business Process Management, 2012, John Dixon, July 27, 2012. ² Gartner, Hype Cycle for Analytic Applications, 2012, Gareth Herschel, August 8, 2012.  ³ Gartner, Hype Cycle for Big Data, 2012, Anne Lapkin, July 31, 2012