Smarter Systems for Uncertain Times

At last week's Business Rules Forum, I attended James Taylor's keynote on the role of decision management in agile, smarter systems. Much of this is based on the book he co-authored with Neil Raden, Smart (Enough) Systems, which I reviewed shortly after its release.

Our systems need to be smarter because we live in a time of constant, rapid change -- regulations change; competition changes due to globalization; business models and methods change -- and businesses need to respond to this change or risk losing their competitive edge. It's not enough to be a smarter organization, however: you have to have smarter systems because of the volume and complexity of the events that drive businesses today, the need to respond in real time, and the complexity of the network of systems by which products and services are delivered to customers.Smarter systems have four characteristics:

Decision management is an approach -- not a technology stack -- that allows you to add decisioning to your current systems in order to make them smarter. You also need to consider the management discipline around this that will allow systems to not just become smarter, but begin to make decisions and take actions without human intervention.

James had a number of great examples of smarter systems in practice, and wrapped up with the key to smarter systems: have a management focus on decisions, find the decisions that make a difference to your business, externalize those decisions from other systems, and put the processes in place to automate those decisions and their actions.

To subscribe to the weekly Intelligent Enterprise newsletters, click here.We live in a time of constant, rapid change, and businesses need to respond to this change or risk losing their competitive edge. It's not enough to be a smarter organization: you have to have smarter systems because of the volume and complexity of the events that drive businesses today. Smarter systems have four characteristics...