Business Rules Forum Targets Enterprise Decisioning as the Next Big Thing

I’m headed back from the combined Business Rules Forum / Rules Technology Summit / Rules Expo conference in Orlando. Theme of the conference was ‘Enterprise Decisioning Comes of Age’. The general idea is that business rules have been applied extensively in a few areas, including fraud detection and insurance rating, and are now poised to play a larger role in coordinating decisions throughout the enterprise. This idea has been championed in particular by James Taylor, formerly of Fair Isaac and now running his own firm Smart (Enough) Systems, who seems to have near rock star status within this community.

This is all music to my own ears, since the Customer Experience Matrix is precisely designed as a tool to help enterprises understand how all their pieces fit together across channels and the customer life cycle. It therefore provides an essential framework for organizing, prioritizing and integrating enterprise decision projects. Whether the generic notion of ‘enterprise decision management’ really takes off as the Next Big Thing remains to be seen – it still sounds pretty geeky. One question is what it takes for CEOs to get really excited about the concept: because it is by definition enterprise wide, it takes CEO sponsorship to make it happen. Neither James nor other panelists at the discussions I heard really had an answer for that one.