Being on holiday gives me different perspectives. I’m in New England getting ready for my sons wedding this coming weekend. As part of the trip we decided to stop at a theme park and get a good jolt of adrenalin. I always enjoy roller coasters, so I thought I would take on a few. As I was waiting in line with nothing to do except look at people, my mind wandered to how much roller coasters have changed so radically over the last several decades. It seems that there is a reasonable parallel for the managers that have to make decisions in today’s world. In the past, old wooden roller coasters basically had ups and downs with a few corners to boot. Today roller coasters whip you upside down, twist you, barrel roll you and do contortions that were unimaginable in the past. It’s because of a shift in technologies and a driving need for more thrills
Well today’s business environment is providing thrills that one could hardly imagine in the decade before and there is more to come. The timing and sophistication of decisions is going to change radically. I would also predict that the technologies employed will become more advanced and combined in new ways. We all know that we have been under serving the decision makers for a long period of time and we have been very reactionary in the process.
The History:
We have given business professionals some support, but look at what’s been done In reaction to waiting on IT, we have given business folks data marts, spread sheets and limited business intelligence tools. Since the latent demand for better decisions will always be there, the BI camp has been flourishing, though the vendors keep consolidating in the BI arena. BI is a commodity and need to step up to the plate. Looking in the rear view mirrors in helpful, but no sufficient. Reactionary is helpful, but is no longer a luxury in today’s business world.
The Future:
Business activity monitoring (BAM) is picking up the need for making decisions in a more timely fashion and complex events processing (CEP) is adding a new an valued information stream that helps in to time to market decisions and/or actions. These efforts can be process focused or not. These efforts can be reading traditional sources or scanning for weak pulses. I see a day when organizations will have to proactive. This will mean more scenario plans for unexpected scenarios, but also projected unexpected and even weird twist and turns in the light of history. Look for new combinations of methods and technologies including prediction, optimization, simulation, business rules management, BAM and CEP
I am excited about the future of decisions, going forward, like I get pumped for a new roller coaster. What is your favorite roller coaster?
Additonal Reading:
http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/02/scenario-planning-is-no-longer-optional/
3 responses so far ↓
1 Ian Gotts // Jun 16, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Love the analogy.
2 Ian Gotts // Jun 16, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Sorry – question was favourite roller-coaster. Founder and CEO of Nimbus. Start-up to enterprise software vendor to ..??? Exciting, scary, unexpected turns, sudden drops, steep climbs….. but no safety net or seat belts.
3 Tobias Blickle // Jun 22, 2009 at 8:01 am
My favorite roller coaster will be named “process intelligence”. Process intelligence focusses on the direct link between metrics / indicators on one hand, and the end-to-end processes (e. g. Order-to-Cash,Procurement-to-Pay, Idea-to-Product) causing these indicators on the other hand. To combine the BAM/CEP approach with business priocess information is the key enabler for companies to improve customer relation ships and react on changing markets. That’s what our customers like most at our process-centric business intelligence approach (including in-memory analytics and automatic process discovery).
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