(Posted by Guest Blogger, and Quasi-James, Ian Turvill.)
I know that you all miss James's more detailed, regular postings while he has put himself into seclusion to finish off his great American novel.
So, in an effort to stave off the feelings of loneliness and rejection, I've just added a new recording to our associated podcast feed. It features me interviewing James about his forthcoming presentation at Fair Isaac's InterACT Lisbon event: "The Smarter Decisions Conference."
James's session is entitled "How EDM Really Works" and is intended as an introduction to business-level decision makers to the principles and approaches of Enterprise Decision Management.
If you're going to be in Lisbon, then don't miss this session; if you're not already signed up, then perhaps this will be the impetus for you to go. James offered a special discount to blog readers late in 2006. To sign up to attend InterACT, please click here.
This podcast is the first of a series of interviews I've recorded to promote the event, and I shall post others once they've completed the post-production process. (That's when they add the funky music.)
Download: Decisions Podcast #10: How EDM Really Works (10:10 min, 7:03MB, mp3)
You can also subscribe to the Podcast Feed with this URL.
Hopefully, you can download this onto your iPod before you go to bed this evening, and snuggle up listening to James between your ears knowing that everything is all right with the world.
A friend (Hi Ken) referred me to this post about search by David Berlind. Now while I think unstructured text in decision automation and Enterprise Decision Management or EDM is going to be more and more important and while I realize I have not blogged much about unstructured text analysis (note to self, write post on this), I actually wanted to drill down in David's phrase "competitive productivity". Here's how he introduced
it:
To businesses with a lot of information workers, any technological advancements that can whittle that 25 percent [time spent searching for information] down to 20, 15, 10 or even 5 percent means that respectively, those workers can be spending 5, 10, 15 or event 20 percent more of their time on tasks that contribute more directly (more directly than searching) to competitive advantage. In fact, freeing up time to focus on those activities that contribute to competitive advantage — long-hand for what
I'm going to start calling "competitive productivity" (versus plain ole' "productivity")
This is a great concept and highly relevant to anyone thinking about EDM. EDM is about automating and improving decisions, particularly those that require some expert judgment or for which some data exists that could be used to make or improve the decision. Clearly these decisions are often those taken by information workers - underwriters in insurance, loan
officers, ad pricing managers, materials master designers, supply chain managers, staffing schedulers, diagnostic engineers, eligibility managers and
so on. If I can automate these decisions, at least the most common 85-90-95%, then I likewise free up their time to work on more complex, high-value tasks.
Now some of this is going to overlap - some of the 25% of time spent searching for information is going to be included in the time saved by not having to make the decision manually because it is information being sought to make a decision. I suspect, however, that most of the benefit is additive. The time spent searching for information is probably in support of the most complex decisions and those therefore most likely to be in the small percentage still referred for manual review. The process of automation
will free up some of this time though because you will get a lot more context for the referred decision and this will make it easier to search for information. For instance, a referred policy that needs manual underwriting will say why it is being referred and that will focus the need to search for information down to just the information that will resolve that issue.
Each of the case studies above shows how different decisions can be automated and how they free up information worker time for "competitive productivity".
Technorati Tags: BRE, BRMS, business rules, decision automation, decision service, EDM, Enterprise Decision Management, information worker, search, knowledge worker