Operational business intelligence (BI) has a focus on day-to-day operations and so requires low-latency or real-time data to be integrated with historical data. It also requires BI systems that are integrated with operational business processes. However, while operational BI might be part
and parcel of operational processes and systems, the focus is still on changing how people make decisions in an operational context. To compete on decisions, however, you must recognize that your customers react to the choices made by you, your staff and your systems, and that you must manage all the decisions you (or your systems) make – even the
very small ones. This is the basis for enterprise decision management or EDM. Five main areas of difference exist between operational BI and EDM – a focus on decisions (especially operational
ones), organizational integration, analytic technology change, adoption of additional technology and adaptive control.
In this article, I want to outline some steps organizations can take as they move from “traditional” BI towards operational BI and enterprise decision management. Some of these steps would be a good idea if operational BI was your goal. But hopefully you are more ambitious than that and want to really begin to compete on decisions.
Rob sees three key areas where rules can help:
Tighter warranty controls
Claims processing is improved because financial limits, detailed coverage types, materials return and more can be automated and rapidly changed when necessary. The rules also allow “what-if” testing and impact analysis.
Better built vehicles
The decision making is tracked very closely thanks to rules so you can analyze specific repair types, specific VINs and so on. More effective parts return and generally better information also contribute.
Lower cost repairs
Rules allow goodwill repairs, labor-only repairs and specific kinds of repairs to be managed very precisely. Rules-driven decisioning can reduce the variation of costs between dealers and help intervene, rejecting or editing claims that seem overly expensive. The ability of rules to deploy data mining and predictive analytics can also really help here.
Substitute a standard web services interface for a speaking tube, a business rules management system for his encyclopedic knowledge of policies and regulations, data mining or predictive analytics for his customer knowledge and adaptive control for his experimentation and you have Decision Management. The Answerer but on an industrial scale.
Activity diagrams are a loosely defined diagram technique for showing workflows of stepwise activities and actions, with support for choice, iteration and concurrency.[1] In the Unified Modeling Language, activity diagrams can be used to describe the business and operational step-by-step workflows of components in a system. An activity diagram shows the overall flow of control.
D. Kulkarni, and A. Tripathi. SACMAT '08: Proceedings of the 13th ACM symposium on Access control models and technologies, page 113--122. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2008)
M. LeMay, R. Nelli, G. Gross, and C. Gunter. HICSS '08: Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, page 174. Washington, DC, USA, IEEE Computer Society, (2008)