in his Information Management Blog / Forrester Muse titled "Decision Management, Possibly the Last Frontier in BI" leans on an excellent article on the subject by Tom Davenport and reports on Forrester Research and the trend for 'Thinking Ahead" companies to venture into combining reporting and analytics with decision management along the following lines:
Unfortunately, current best practices and technologies to address these four distinct, but closely related requirements, come from different vendors, technologies and experts.- Automated (machine) vs. non automated (human) decisions, and
- Decisions that involve structured (rules and workflows) and unstructured (collaboration) processes.
According to Evelson, Tom Davenport pointed out a challenge.
Which is?
How does one convince a non-analytically oriented CEO that analytics and decision management are vital to enterprise success?
The gap according to Davenport.
"There’s a big, big gap between the most analytical and the least analytical. American business has a fair number of CEOs with engineering backgrounds, and they tend to be relatively analytical. At the same time, an awful lot have sales backgrounds, and they’re not analytical at all. Clearly, you could do a lot of analytics with sales, but people don’t generally go into sales because they like numbers. Executives with legal backgrounds also don’t tend to be very quantitative in their decision approaches."
Evelson explains that analytics and decision management are very hard (but possible) to build a business case around, with a concrete, tangible ROI, using competitive BI benchmarks.
And he concludes by pointing out that, analytics on analytics – or understanding when, who, and how analytics are used in an enterprise, and potentially correlating usage of analytics to decisions, good or bad - is also one of the emerging best practices.
Boris also blogs at http://blogs.forrester.com/boris_evelson/.
