Jim Sinur

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Jim Sinur
Research VP
2 years at Gartner
42 years IT industry

Jim Sinur is a vice president in Gartner Research after a short stint with a BPM vendor. Prior to that, Mr. Sinur was with Gartner 15 years and helped establish the BPI/BPM areas at Gartner and is considered a thought leader. His research and areas… Read Full Bio

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Are You Driving Through Your Rear View Mirrors?

by Jim Sinur  |  October 16, 2008  |  4 Comments

Believe it or not, organizations seem to be driving through their rear view mirrors looking at past results and history to guide their decisions. While this is a valuable approach, it doesn’t cut it in changing environments. Today, BI efforts generally look at past results even though some of the BI vendors support predictive analysis. I think that this approach of looking at the past data trends and correlation will need to be expanded to include more forward looking for better decision making and better anticipation of emerging conditions.

This will require adding new sources of information in a near real time fashion. The first would be to look at processes “in flight” and look at complex events outside the organization that represent the context of the organizations present and future sweet spot of business participation. In the future this could even include cascading effects of decisions on neighborhood industries and geo-political arenas.

It will also require adding more intelligence to decision process by creating a decision sandbox to simulate the cascading effects of decisions. I also envision an intelligent decision management (IDM) suite of supports that will likely include business rules, constraints and heuristics. It’s time to give our organizations better decision environments to improve their ability to collaborate and build better mental maps before they decide

4 Comments »

Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules     Tags: , ,

4 responses so far ↓

  • 1 How many different kinds of decision management are there? » Smart (Enough) Systems, the blog   October 21, 2008 at 6:48 pm

    [...] at least one more as of today – Jim Sinur, over on his Gartner blog – has finally started to use the phrase he has been threatening to use for a while [...]

  • 2 James Taylor   October 21, 2008 at 6:49 pm

    Blogged a quick response – How many different kinds of decision management are there?

    JT

    Author, with Neil Raden, of Smart (Enough) Systems

  • 3 Laurent Pacalin   October 27, 2008 at 7:47 pm

    Jim:

    This is very true many organizations are still managing their business by looking in the rear-view mirror. Fortunately, there is light at the end of the tunnel and a growing number of customers are already leveraging the power of predictive analytics and business rules. We call it Decision Management!

    Laurent Pacalin
    CMO
    Fair Isaac

  • 4 Jim Sinur   October 28, 2008 at 3:40 pm

    Laurent,

    This is encouraging and we have now opened up an area of research called Intelligent Decision Management that will deal with this movement towrds desling with complex events, predictive analsytics and scenario planning enabled by business rules management. We have hope as well :)

    JIm