Decision Intelligence

Recently, I read an interesting article in B-Eye Network, by Claudia Imhoff and Colin White, called Full Circle: Decision Intelligence (DSS 2.0), where they are defining the concept of decision intelligence.

In the article, they talk about the BI trends, and explain the concept and the components of Decision Intelligence.

They are considering how decision intelligence brings together traditional and operational BI, operational processing, and the collaborative and business content environments:

- In traditional BI, applications query, report on and analyze historical data stored in a data warehouse, and produce strategic and tactical analytics.
- The operational BI processing is integrated into the operational environment To support high data volumes and close to real time decision making.
- The collaborative and business content environment is the third component involved in decision intelligence. Unstructured business content can come from the collaborative environment itself (office productivity suites, social computing tools), BI environment (reports, spreadsheets) and operational processes (purchase orders, call center logs).

Architecture for Decision Intelligence:


They finished the article explaining why the concept of decision intelligence:
"Our motivation in creating the concept of decision intelligence is to break the misconception that you must have a tight connection between business intelligence and data warehousing. Data warehouses are not going to go away. They are very successful at producing both strategic and tactical business data intelligence and, in some cases, operational business process intelligence. There are, however, a growing number of solutions that don’t require a data warehouse. These solutions don’t replace data warehousing, but provide valuable additions to it. It is important to remember that data warehousing came about to overcome issues with earlier decision support systems, and modern technologies are removing the need to always store data first in a data warehouse before it can be used for decision making."

I think the BI/PM fields are shifting dramatically, creating increasingly new concepts and different approaches.