Using game theory to predict the future and make strategic decisions

Neil Raden's Tweet¹ caught my attention about the book of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, called The Predictioneer’s Game: Using the Logic of Brazen Self-Interest to See and Shape the Future.


Bruce is a research in game theory, and Professor at New York University and Stanford University. He is also a partner in Mesquita & Roundell, a consulting firm that uses game theory models he developed to assist corporations and the U.S. intelligence (CIA and the Department of Defense) and policymaking community in complex negotiations involving mergers and acquisitions, litigation, regulation, and national security matters.

Bruce wrote in his website: "Decision making is one of the last frontiers barely touched by science in day-to-day use. The Predictioneer’s Game was written to help change that. Don’t get me wrong, I am all for wisdom and “street smarts.” But it is awfully hard to know who is wise and who has great intuition before decisions have to be made. It is much more helpful to have a proven method to connect the dots correctly beforehand. That is true whether addressing everyday life, business choices, or the biggest national security questions. The Predictioneer’s Game is about learning to come up with reliable predictions to foresee and even engineer the future."

I have not read his book yet, but I intend to read it soon. Based in the book's excerpts published in his site, I think it is very interesting.

Last year Bruce gave a good lecture at TED: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita predicts Iran's future. According TED: "Bruce Bueno de Mesquita uses mathematical analysis to predict (very often correctly) such messy human events as war, political power shifts, Intifada ... After a crisp explanation of how he does it, he offers three predictions on the future of Iran."



Other interesting links with articles about Bruce Bueno de Mesquita:

- Good Magazine article, “The New Nostradamus”
- New York Times Sunday Magazine Profile


1 - Tweet is a message in Twitter.

The Decision Management Solutions webinar series

Tomorrow, September 23, 10 AM PT, will start the Decision Management Solutions webinar series with an introduction to the 5 core principles of decision management, by James Taylor. This session will outline 5 core principles of decision management in a non-technical fashion. Suitable for those new to Decision Management as well as those looking for ways to describe Decision Management to non-technical colleagues.

Next week, September 30, Eric Siegel, president of Prediction Impact Inc., will present on optimizing business decisions, how best to apply predictive analytics. Harnessing value with predictive analytics depends on some careful choices: What kind of customer behavior you predict and which operational decisions you automate with it. This webinar will guide you in making these choices, and cover a healthy dose of the core technology along the way.

There are 11 webinars in the series and you can use the registration page for the series to register for several at once. In the registration page, you can also see the details on each webinar.

The Decision Management Solutions webinar series is organized by James Taylor through his company, Decision Management Solutions, and it is a great opportunity to learn more on the subject with leading experts as James Taylor, Eric Siegel, Barbra von Halle, Larry Goldberg and many others.

For those interested in Decision Management, James Taylor and Neil Raden wrote an excellent book: Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions.

Analytics or Intelligence?

During a presentation at SAS Global Forum, a statement from Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of SAS, has made several posts were written about the same issue.

Jim Davis said: “Business intelligence is an over-used term that has had its day, and business analytics is now the differentiator that will allow customers to better forecast the future especially in this current economic climate.” and also said: "I don't believe (business intelligence is) where the future is, the future is in business analytics."


James Taylor commented in a post entitled Business Intelligence or Business Analytics?: "This distinction between Business Intelligence (what everyone else does) and Business Analytics (what SAS does) struck me as a distinction without a difference.", and finished with: "I guess I just don't see the difference between BI and BA..."

Peter Thomas, in a post called Business Analytics vs Business Intelligence, made a good analysis on what Jim said. "Maybe the marketing terms business intelligence and business analytics (together with Enterprise Performance Management, Executive Information Systems and Decision Support Systems) should be consigned to the scrap heap and replaced by the simpler Management Information", Peter said.

Neil Raden was there at the forum, and wrote a good post: From 'BI' to 'Business Analytics,' It's All Fluff, where he said: "SAS as a company makes most of its money on its classic product that is almost completely complementary to BI.SAS has vastly expanded its product line over the years to include all sorts of BI tools such as performance management, OLAP, visualization and data integration, but judging by the attendees I met there, most of them are involved with the flagship product that crunches datasets, performs statistical, stochastic, data mining and predictive modeling." He also said: "My guess is that SAS wanted to craft a message that rained on the BI vendors that lack the experience and loyal customer base in analytics."

Neil Raden summarized with: "Bottom line, it's all fluff."

I agree with them. In my opinion, this is pure marketing. SAS is taking advantage of analytics as buzzword, to say that their products are better than the other BI vendors.

BI Predictions for 2009

In the end of last year and in the first days of this year, I have read several articles and posts about BI predictions for 2009. I mentioned in my Twitter.

I think to make predictions is not easy, mainly in Information Technology, and the history shows several examples where the predictions failed. Niels Bohr said: "Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future."


Below are some summaries and comments about posts and articles that BI experts wrote with predictions for 2009:

Ken Rudin wrote his predictions in Lucidera's blog:
- Cloud computing will cause a shift in the BI balance of power from IT to business users
- Simplicity will be the driving mantra for both consumers and vendors of BI
- The continued drive for simplicity will cause a shift towards prebuilt analytic solutions with best practices built in, and away from generic toolsets
- Data interpretation will become a significant challenge for new BI users

He concluded: "So, BI is facing new users and new challenges. With the impact of cloud computing, a shift in the balance of power for BI, additional focus and urgency on delivering simple solutions, and a few new challenges arising around data interpretation, 2009 is going to be a very interesting year for BI."


Neil Raden published his predictions in his Intelligent Entreprise's blog, in a post called Surround the Warehouse: Prediction for 2009. Below is the summary of his predictions:
- The data warehouse has been positioned as the sole source of analytical data in organizations, but that is changing.
- BI tools like Microstrategy have to retool to be able to query multiple sources to satisfy a single query .
- There will be a lot of talk about this and the use of unstructured content, too, but I don't see that happening in '09.
- There will be a lot of noise about the Cloud and x-aaS (SaaS, PaaS, DaaS, etc.), but I don't see that gaining as much actual revenue as it will airtime
- The organizations may see the potential utility of revivifying their data warehouse strategy, but they just don't know how to do it. So despite all of the innovative and useful things the industry comes up with, the data warehouse legacy is like a big boat anchor.

He finished with: "And that's why I see the "surround strategy" of augmenting BI with operational data while leaving the data warehouse in place as the best opportunity right now."


Ted Cuzzillo wrote a post in Enterprise Systems, and said: "A variety of sources tell me that the financial crisis will be 2009's primary driver, as trends from early this year accelerate."

His predictions are:
- The few big tools will start giving way to many small tools
- Business users will take more of BI back from analysts
- Analytics will gain new importance
- BI's focus will sharpen on the human factor
- BI will surge in the mid-market


James Taylor wrote his Predictions for 2009 in his blog on December, focused on Decision Management, and also compared with some BI predictions (Ken Rudin and Ted Cuzzillo, both commented above):
- Cloud computing will impact decision management
- More use of analytics by systems rather than people
- More focus on rules from application and platform vendors
- More business rule vendors
- More rules in Business Process Management
- Business rules to decision management
- Pre-built decisioning components
- Simulation and scenario management
- More business user control


IDC published its Predictions for 2009, I already commented in a previous post.


Colin White wrote a post called BI Predictions for 2009: What Ever It Takes to Get the Job Done, in his B-Eye-Network's blog. I highlight:
- The business intelligence (BI) marketplace has often been immune to industry downturns. This is because companies often turn to BI in difficult times to help them identify areas where revenues can be increased and costs can be reduced. This is especially the case in front office sales, marketing, and support organizations. Given the potential size of the coming downturn, however, can even BI be immune? I doubt it.
- The BI solutions that will have the most impact in 2009 will be those that provide IT and business users quick and low-cost approaches for discovering, accessing, integrating, analyzing, delivering and sharing information in a way that that helps business users become more productive and more self-sufficient.
- open source software, BI software-as-a-service, low-cost application appliances, search, the integration of BI with collaborative and social computing software, rich internet applications, web syndication, and data and presentation mashups.
- line-of-business IT rather than the enterprise IT organization. This could result in a turf war where enterprise IT tries to control and govern the use of these new technologies by the business.


Krish Krishnan commented about data warehouse appliances, in a post in his B-Eye-Network's blog:
"my predictions about data warehouse appliances going mainstream is indeed happening. Year 2009 will be a significant year for all types of data warehouse appliances and their vendors"


Timo Elliott wrote a different kind of prediction, called Why Will 2009 be a Great Year for Business Intelligence?, where he analyzed the situation, based on data from IDC, Gartner and others articles, and divided in topics:
- The Economy is Awful
- IT Spending is Still Increasing
- Business Intelligence Spending Even More Robust
- Which Vendors Will Do Best?

His Conclusion: "So despite a weak economy, IT spending growth remains positive. Within IT, software spending is the healthiest. And within software spending, BI is a top priority."


Lyndsay Wise wrote a post in his blog, I highlight:
"However, one good thing about business intelligence and performance management in general is that because of the promises of helping increase performance while potentially lowering costs, organizations that tend to over spend and under perform will need to account for their spending more than in the past. Consequently, the role of BI may become more important in many organizations..."


Search Data Management published yesterday an excellent article called Experts forecast business intelligence market trends for 2009, by Jeff Kelly, where Wayne Eckerson, James G. Kobielus and Gartner's analysts shared their BI forecasts.

Wayne Eckerson, Director of research and services for The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI):
- Analytic database platforms go mainstream
- Open source BI gets evaluated
- Packaged analytic applications gain traction
- Software as a Service (SaaS) picks up in the midmarket
- Next-generation dashboards emerge
- Analytical literacy improves
- More analytical sandboxes come to the fore
- BI goes green
- Advanced visualization corrals BI
- Event-driven analytic platforms hit the scene

James G. Kobielus, Senior analyst at Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research covering BI and data warehousing:
- BI moves into the cloud
- BI adopting Web 2.0 development paradigm
- BI growing more federated
- BI evolving into advanced analytic applications

Gartner Inc. - Various Gartner Inc. analysts covering BI, including Bill Hostmann, Kurt Schlegel, Mark A. Beyer, Rita L. Sallam, Bill Gassman, Nigel Rayner, Neil McMurchy, Neil Chandler, Matthew W. Cain:
- By 2012, business units will control at least 40% of the total budget for BI
- Through 2012, more than 35% of the top 5,000 global companies will regularly fail to make insightful decisions about significant changes in their business and markets
- By 2010, 20% of organizations will have an industry-specific analytic application delivered via SaaS as a standard component of their BI portfolio
- In 2009, collaborative decision making will emerge as a new product category that combines social software with BI platform capabilities
- By 2012, one-third of analytic applications applied to business processes will be delivered through large-grained application mashups.


Despite the economic crisis, and based on predictions of those experts, I think 2009 will be a good year for Business Intelligence. I'm optimistic about it.


P.S.: The Crystal Ball picture is just for illustrate the post, I know that the experts mentioned here made their predictions based on data, information, and their expertise and knowledge of BI market.

Why Performance Management and Business Intelligence are Crucial at this Moment

Howard Dresner wrote recently in his blog, a nice post called Why Performance Management and Business Intelligence are Crucial at this Moment, where he told about the importance of use BI/PM to direct the companies to make better decisions during the world crisis.

He said: "the wise organization carefully analyzes the current threat, developing multiple scenarios for the future and creates suitable short and long term plans. This forward-thinking approach allows management to proceed strategically, with an eye to the future, but still grounded in the present." and "EPM and BI are critical during this time. This is true. However, I don’t mean just the technology. I mean the philosophy! This begins with transparency and accountability. Without those as core tenets of an organization, the best technology won’t help. However, under the right conditions, BI and EPM can work wonders – allowing an organization to quickly develop perspective, to assess strengths, weaknesses and capabilities."



Gary Cokins commented: "It baffles me why some organizations hesitate to apply business intelligence (BI) tools and the performance management methodologies that convert BI’s potential into realized results."

Neil Raden commented: "You're of course right that many organizations will take the knee-jerk approach and cut expenses. Despite all of our exhortations, '09 will probably be a weak year for BI/EPM software. I hope I'm wrong." I also hope Neil Raden is wrong, but unfortunately I agree with him, because I also think 2009 will be a weak year for BI/PM software.

I agree with Howard Dresner, PM and BI are critical during this time, and increasingly important the companies to use BI/PM to make better decisions. Mainly because of the crisis, with the companies cutting costs and decreasing budgets, they should think of BI/PM not only as a cost, but a necessary investment to help them to drive their companies to an effectively strategic management.

Indeed, I think there are some ways for companies save money and reduce BI/PM costs without affecting their business objectives. I believe that companies should consolidate existing solutions and projects, or to develop new solutions using their already purchased BI/PM softwares (I am considering companies that have good BI/PM tools). Thus, the companies can save money on software, hardware and training, and don't fall into the trap of buying one more BI tool. However, if the companies really need to adquire tools, Open Source Business Intelligence (OSBI) or Software as a Service (SaaS) can be good choices to be evaluated.

Upgrading your data integration efforts to enable Business Intelligence (BI) 2.0

I read a post in Informatica Corporation's blog, entitled Upgrading your data integration efforts to enable Business Intelligence (BI) 2.0, written by Rick Sherman.

He mentioned two good articles that talking about the concepts of BI 2.0, the first article called Business Intelligence 2.0: Simpler, More Accessible, Inevitable, written by Neil Raden, and published in Intelligent Enterprise; and the second article called BI 2.0: The Next Generation, written by Charles Nichols, and published in DM Review.

He said: "With the advent of ICCs (Integration Competency Centers) and robust data integration suites, companies can eliminate integration stovepipe efforts and work towards enabling one data integration backbone. Common people, processes and procedures work towards data integration.

BI 2.0 sounds cool and makes you think you need yet another BI tool. Of course that BI tool has to be the latest and greatest BI tool on the market today but don’t be fooled, it is really not about BI 2.0 but rather DI 2.0 (Data Integration 2.0.)"

I agree with him when he talks about data integration, but I think the new concepts of Data Integration are included in the concepts of BI 2.0.

Eight business technology trends to watch

The McKinsey Quarterly, the business journal of McKinsey & Company, published recently a good article called Eight business technology trends to watch, where they talk about the eight technology-enabled business trends will really matter.

They start the article talking that technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business.

They divide the eight trends in three groups: Managing relationships, Managing capital and assets, and Leveraging information in new ways. They mention several books as further reading in each trend, these are good trends and also a very good list of reference for further reading.

Managing relationships
1- Distributing cocreation
The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries.
Further reading:
Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating and Profiting from Technology, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, New York: Doubleday, 2004.
Eric von Hippel, Democratizing Innovation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

2- Using consumers as innovators
Consumers also cocreate with companies, and the differences between the way companies cocreate with partners, on the one hand, and with customers, on the other, are so marked that the consumer side is really a separate trend. These differences include the nature and range of the interactions, the economics of making them work, and the management challenges associated with them.
Further reading:
C. K. Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy, The Future of Competition: Co-Creating Unique Value with Customers, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.
Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, New York: Portfolio Hardcover, 2006.

3- Tapping into a world of talent
Top talent for a range of activities—from finance to marketing and IT to operations—can be found anywhere.
Further reading:
Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books, 2004.
Daniel H. Pink, Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live, New York: Warner Books, 2001.

4- Extracting more value from interactions
Companies have been automating or offshoring an increasing proportion of their production and manufacturing (transformational) activities and their clerical or simple rule-based (transactional) activities. As a result, a growing proportion of the labor force in developed economies engages primarily in work that involves negotiations and conversations, knowledge, judgment, and ad hoc collaboration—tacit interactions, as we call them.
Further reading:
Bradford C. Johnson, James M. Manyika, and Lareina A. Yee, “The next revolution in interactions,” mckinseyquarterly.com, November 2005.
Scott C. Beardsley, Bradford C. Johnson, and James M. Manyika, “Competitive advantage from better interactions,” mckinseyquarterly.com, May 2006.
Thomas W. Malone, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.

Managing capital and assets
5- Expanding the frontiers of automation
Companies, governments, and other organizations have put in place systems to automate tasks and processes: forecasting and supply chain technologies; systems for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and HR; product and customer databases; and Web sites. Now these systems are becoming interconnected through common standards for exchanging data and representing business processes in bits and bytes. What’s more, this information can be combined in new ways to automate an increasing array of broader activities, from inventory management to customer service.
Further reading:
John Hagel III, Out of the Box: Strategies for Achieving Profits Today and Growth Tomorrow through Web Services, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002.
Claus Heinrich, RFID and Beyond: Growing Your Business with Real World Awareness, Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing, 2005.
Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David C. Robertson, Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2006.

6- Unbundling production from delivery
Technology helps companies to utilize fixed assets more efficiently by disaggregating monolithic systems into reusable components, measuring and metering the use of each, and billing for that use in ever-smaller increments cost effectively. Information and communications technologies handle the tracking and metering critical to the new models and make it possible to have effective allocation and capacity-planning systems.
Further reading:
Robert D. Hof, “Jeff Bezos’ risky bet,” BusinessWeek, November 13, 2006.

Leveraging information in new ways
7- Putting more science into management
Just as the Internet and productivity tools extend the reach of and provide leverage to desk-based workers, technology is helping managers exploit ever-greater amounts of data to make smarter decisions and develop the insights that create competitive advantages and new business models. From “ideagoras” (eBay-like marketplaces for ideas) to predictive markets to performance-management approaches, ubiquitous standards-based technologies promote aggregation, processing, and decision making based on the use of growing pools of rich data.
Further reading:
Thomas H. Davenport and Jeanne G. Harris, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007.
John Riedl and Joseph Konstan with Eric Vrooman, Word of Mouse: The Marketing Power of Collaborative Filtering, New York: Warner Books, 2002.
Stefan H. Thomke, Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003.
David Weinberger, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, New York: Times Books, 2007.

8- Making businesses from information
Accumulated pools of data captured in a number of systems within large organizations or pulled together from many points of origin on the Web are the raw material for new information-based business opportunities.
Frequent contributors to what economists call market imperfections include information asymmetries and the frequent inability of decision makers to get all the relevant data about new market opportunities, potential acquisitions, pricing differences among suppliers, and other business situations. These imperfections often allow middlemen and players with more and better information to extract higher rents by aggregating and creating businesses around it.
Further reading:
Hal R. Varian, Joseph Farrell, and Carl Shapiro, The Economics of Information Technology: An Introduction (Raffaele Mattioli Lectures), New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1999.

They concluded the article with: "Creative leaders can use a broad spectrum of new, technology-enabled options to craft their strategies. These trends are best seen as emerging patterns that can be applied in a wide variety of businesses. Executives should reflect on which patterns may start to reshape their markets and industries next—and on whether they have opportunities to catalyze change and shape the outcome rather than merely react to it."

This is a good article, and this is also a very good list of reference for further reading, but I would like to add two interesting books in the list:

- trend 5- Expanding the frontiers of automation
James Taylor and Neil Raden, Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions, Prentice Hall PTR , 2007.


- trend 7- Putting more science into management
Wayne W. Eckerson, Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business, Wiley, 2005.


I think with these two books, the list is more complete.

The Semantic Web and Web 3.0

Tomorrow, September 25th at 3PM ET, the DM Review,in its initiative called DM Radio, will provide a live web broadcast called The Semantic Web and Web 3.0, hosted by Eric Kavanagh with Jim Ericson.

Accordind DM Review: "You've likely heard of the Semantic Web, which some pundits say will usher in Web 3.0. More than just a new spin on an old domain, the Semantic Web promises to essentially re-architect Internet content in a way that facilitates a new level of information integration. What will that mean for the burgeoning industry of business intelligence and data warehousing? How will this Semantic Web affect business strategy, decision-making; and what impact will it have on the lucrative enterprise software market for information management?

Tune into this episode of DM Radio to hear the experts explain what's happening and why. We'll talk to Hired Brains co-founder Neil Raden, who will outline the Web Ontology Language (OWL), which is built on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), a relatively new W3C standard for for describing Web resources, such as the title, author, modification date, content, and copyright information of a Web page. We'll also hear from Jason Hekl of InQuira, and a special guest.

Attendees will learn:
- Why the Semantic Web changes the rules of information management
- What impact the Semantic Web could have on enterprise architectures
- How organizations can transition from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0
- How relational information models will be affected
- What a declarative ontology is all about."

In the DM Review website, you can register for this live Web broadcast.

You also can check out the DM Radio archives to hear previous programs with a variety of other issues.

I think this episode of DM Radio will be very nice, the subject is interesting; and also because I like so much to read the Neil Raden's blog in Intelligent Enterprise, he is an experienced professional, has good ideas and an interesting point of view about the business and technologic issues. He is co-founder of Smart (enough) Systems, a company specialized in Enterprise Decision Management.

About problems and resistance to adopt EDM

This week, James Taylor (Smart Enough Systems) wrote in his blog, a very nice post called The empire has less staff,about problems and resistance to adopt Enterprise Decision Management(EDM). He starts the post mentioning a comment (also interesting) that one reader did in his previous post: Here’s how to get started with decision management, and develops his thoughts about this issue.

He finished the post with a good statement:
"EDM is a great approach but it needs the same kind of organizational readiness and flexibility that any new development approach does and it can be limited by the politics and performance measurement systems that are in place.You can, and should, “think global, act local” and get started with a focused EDM project because success will make the necessary organizational change easier."

Very nice post about the founded barriers to implement EDM in the companies.

For those interested in Enterprise Decision Management, James Taylor and Neil Raden, his partner on Smart Enough Systems, wrote an exceptional book:

Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions

Requirements Gathering: Don't Be Naïve

Today, Neil Raden (Smart Enough Systems) wrote an interesting article in Intelligent Enterprise, called Requirements Gathering: Don't Be Naïve.

In the article, he talks about what he thinks be wrong in the issue of business requirements gathering.

He has an interesting point of view and made me think about this issue. I agree with him when he said: "use experienced people who already have a good handle on what organizations like yours have done successfully", but I also know that is increasingly more difficult to find experienced people with those skills.

I think nowadays one of the most important challenges in BI projects is to find experienced people that have good skills to do the important work of business requirements gathering.

What's the Difference between Decision Management and Performance Management?

Yesterday, Neil Raden (Smart Enough Systems) wrote a post in his blog on Intelligent Enterprise, about the "discussion" between Gary Cokins and James Taylor, to define the terms Decision Management and Performance Management.

In my opinion, there are three different opinions, by three great expert professionals that don't need presentation, showing for us how is difficult to define the roles and the boundaries of incipient concepts.

I agree with Neil Raden when he said, ending the article: "EDM is operational at the detail level of the business. Performance Management is a collection of disciplines for executing strategy and continuously monitoring the results. There should be a nice synergy between them, but either one could do fine without the other."

For those interested in Enterprise Decision Management, James Taylor and Neil Raden wrote an exceptional book:

Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions