Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 432 pages
- Published by: Prentice Hall PTR July 9, 2007
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0132347962
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0132347969
-
Book Dimensions:
8.9 x 6.8 x 0.9 inches
- Weighs: 1.3 pounds
Product Description
“Automated decisions systems are probably already being used in your industry, and they will undoubtedly grow in importance. If your business requirements to make quick, accurate decisions on an industrialized scale, you need to read this book.”
Thomas H. Davenport, Professor, Babson College, Author of Competing on Analytics
The computer-based systems most organizations rely on to support their businesses are not very smart. Many of the business decisions these companies make tend to be hidden in systems that make poor decisions, or don’t make them at all. Further, most systems struggle to keep up with the pace of change.
The answer is not to implement newer, “intelligent” systems. The fact is that much of today’s existing technology has the potential to be “smart enough” to make a big difference to an organization’s business. This book tells you how.
Although the business context and underlying principles are explained in a nontechnical manner, the book also contains how-to guidance for more technical readers.
The book’s companion site, www.smartenoughsystems.com, has additional information and references for practitioners as well as news and updates.
Additional Praise for Smart (Enough) Systems
“James Taylor and Neil Raden are on to something important in this book–the awesome value of improving the large number of routine decisions that are made in organizations every day.”
Dr. Hugh J. Watson, Chair of Business Administration, University of Georgia
“This is a very important book. It lays out the agenda for business technology in the new century–nothing less than how to reorganize every aspect of how a company treats its customers.”
David Raab, President, ClientXClient
“This book is an important contribution to business productivity because it covers the opportunity from both the business executive’s and technologist’s perspective. This should be on every operational executive’s and every CIO’s list of essential reading.”
John Parkinson, Former CTO, Capgemini, North American Region
“This book shows how to use proven technology to make business processes smarter. It clearly makes the case that organizations need to optimize their operational decisions. It is a must-have reference for process professionals throughout your organization.”
Jim Sinur, Chief Strategy Officer, Global 360, Inc.
About The Author
James Taylor
Prior to co-founding Smart (Enough) Systems, James Taylor was a Vice President at Fair Isaac Corporation where he developed and refined the concept of enterprise decision management or EDM. Widely credited with the invention of the term and the best known proponent of the approach, Mr Taylor helped create the emerging EDM market and is a passionate advocate of decision management. Mr. Taylor has twenty years experience in all aspects of the design, development, marketing and use of advanced technology including CASE tools, project planning and methodology tools as well as platform development in PeopleSoft's R&D team and consulting with Ernst and Young. He has consistently worked to develop approaches, tools and platforms that others can use to build more effective information systems. He is an experienced speaker and author, with his columns and articles appearing regularly in industry magazines.
Neil Raden
Prior to co-founding Smart (Enough) Systems, Neil Raden was the founder of Hired Brains, a research and advisory firm in Santa Barbara, CA, offering research and analysis services to technology providers and venture capitalists as well as providing consulting and implementation services in Business Intelligence and Analytics throughout North America and Europe. Hired Brains, and its predecessor company, Archer Decision Sciences, have been in business for over twenty years, providing services to many of the Global 2000 companies. Mr. Raden began his career as a casualty actuary with AIG in New York before moving into software engineering, consulting and industry analysis, with experience in the application of analytics to business processes from fields as diverse as health care to nuclear waste management to cosmetics marketing and many others in between. The recurrent theme in his work is the need for analytics that can be deployed and used by a wide segment of the population. He is a practicing consultant, industry analyst, speaker and author. His articles appear in industry magazines and he is the author of dozens of sponsored white papers for vendors and other organizations.
Reader Reviews
I've been in the enterprise software business for a long time, and for a long time I've had several related intuitions about how requirements, rules and SOA fit together. But frankly, I never managed to get to a coherent whole about them. Many times while reading this book I kept saying "yes of course, why didn't I think of that?" There are so many excellent insights in this book. Taylor and Raden may have created a new movement with this work in Enterprise Operational Decision Management. The central theme is that organizations are known by the decisions they make, and not just the major strategic decisions, but the myriad small decisions that their thousands of employees make on a day to day basis. Up until now we had to make due with Decision Support, Knowledge Management, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouses and other off-line aids for manual decision making. In the last few years the maturation of Rules Management systems and the near universal adoption of SOA, Work Flow and BPM are making it possible to more the entire decisioning process into real time, whether human assisted or fully automated. Two other profound ideas I want toon are the champion/ challenger concept, and the role of hypothesis and prediction. Each alone is worth the price of the book. The champion/challenger concept says once you have a decision model in place and working you owe it to yourself to constantly challenge it by setting up a series of alternate models and running some percent of the decision flow through the challenger model and testing the outcome against the current (champion) scenario. This wasn't really viable until the advent of SOA. They make a great case for how this arrangement allows firms to continually improve their decision making. A traditional rule system runs off what the experts think the best thing to do in the face of uncertainty. But unless and until a system makes predictions about the outcome of its decisions and closes the loop with the actual results (which of course are often not known for quite some time) it will not be able to improve. This is the heart of their prediction driven decision model. The book is obviously based on a wealth of information: there must be nearly 100 case study/vignettes sprinkled throughout emphasizing the points just made. Excellent and inspiring piece of work.
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