Seventy percent of high-performing companies will manage their business processes using real-time predictive analytics or extreme collaboration by 2016, according to Gartner, Inc.

“It has been technically possible to implement real-time analytics in transactional and record-keeping operational applications for decades. However, few business processes or operational applications have actually used them until recently,” said Jim Sinur. As the sources of business event data proliferate and business application management, complex event processing, rule management, visualization, business process management (BPM), optimization and other software tools improve, IBO [Intelligent Business Operations] is rapidly becoming a more practical and popular solution.”

Jim is completely correct here – the technology exists to build these kinds of systems. In fact these are what I call Decision Management Systems and the technology to build them is documented in our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology Report. As companies strive to build processes that are both efficient and effective, and as they try to embed predictive analytics into real-time, operational environments they will increasingly adopt these technologies. It’s all about making decisions, and doing so automatically, using some combination of business rules and analytics. These decisions help stable processes go “straight through” without manual intervention and can be used also to drive more dynamic processes and case management environments. Because these systems are increasingly real-time they will also be integrating them into event-based systems so that decisions can be made in response to business events as and when they are detected.

What Gartner calls Intelligent Business Operations requires a combination of traditional BPM technology and a set of Decision Management technology. And just as a BPM software required a deliberate, focused effort to identify, understand and model business processes so Decision Management requires a deliberate, focused effort to identify, understand and model decisions. This is why, when we are helping clients adopt these technologies and move toward this future, we always begin with decision discovery and modeling.

If you want Intelligent Business Operations and real-time predictive analytics, begin with the decision in mind.