EbizQ’s Joe McKendrick published an interview this month with the authors of “Smart Enough Systems” – Neil Raden and James Taylor (specialists in BI and decision management respectively) – titled “Decision Management technology enters the mainstream”. Joe writes:
Enter decision management systems, which not only are capable of analyzing the value of data to an organization, but then engage rules engines to automate the decision outcome.
James mentions event-driven systems in his comments about the types of solutions in the decision management space:
The decision management systems market – products that support automated decisioning in some fashion – consists of platform and application technologies. Platform products are things like business rules management systems, optimization engines and predictive analytic workbenches. … In addition, there are pre-configured decision management systems that provide a decision engine –real-time offer management system or a fraud detection system for instance. These typically embed some rules and analytics technology as well as actual rules and models and handle a small group of related decisions. These are mostly in consumer risk, which includes underwriting, loan origination, and retail credit; fraud detection, which includes claims, credit card, and medical; and marketing, which includes next-best offers and retention. Of course, some CRM or marketing systems include these capabilities, just as some BPM or event-processing platforms include business rules and analytic capabilities.
James is quite correct there: indeed event-driven decision management seems to be the increasingly popular overlap between CEP and decision management. CEP technologies like the TIBCO BusinessEvents platform provide both such event-driven rule / decision automation (and management).
