"Taking off" with enterprise decsion management

Ajay Kelkar had a comment on - Live from Teradata (almost) - Improving Customer Experience with EDM. Ajay made the point that a business entering "take off" stage is particularly interesting as there is a belief that you should get to market fast and then, as market changes keep hitting you ,make changes. This gets to a couple of key EDM points - the need to focus not just on automating decisions but on improving them and on adaptive control. Using enterprise decision management, EDM, in a take-off phase is pretty straightforward and high-value:

1. Use business rules to build in agility.
   Focus on the key operational decisions (micro-decisions) that drive your systems and processes. Make sure these are automated as decision services using business rules (FAQ) as this will make it easy to evolve and change your decision-making as circumstances change. Not only does this help you get started quicker, it also helps you respond rapidly to competitors as well as your own changing customer base and business needed.
2. Rules can be judgmental to start with, or even guesses
   Don't be paralyzed by the need to find the "right" rules. These may not exist yet for your business and, even if they do, you may not be able to find them and implement them before they cease to be "right". Get started and focus on learning fast.
3. Use performance management and business intelligent to see what works
   Standard performance management dashboards and BI reports can be used to give you a sense of how things are going. Because your core decisions are implemented in an easy to change way using business rules, the same business users who see the reports can tinkering with and improve the rules that drive your business (though there are some secrets to setting this up).
4. Establish an adaptive control approach
   Adaptive control gives you a more systematic way to try different approaches and drive towards ever-improving results. It is worth implementing for your critical decisions and will require both an understanding of chamption/challenger testing and some infrastructure.
5. Gradually add analytics as you become more established
   As you grow and have more data as well as more experience, you can and should replace your judgmental rules with analytically derived ones. Additionally you can add predictive analytics (FAQ) based on the experience you gain with customers and prospects and use these predictions to improve your decision making and perhaps even extend it in new ways.

Of course you should also buy and read Smart (Enough) Systems and subscribe to this blog!

Technorati Tags: agility, analytics, business agility, business rules, decision service, EDM, enterprise decision management, predictive analytics, Smart (Enough) Systems, smartenoughsystems