Linking Insight to Action: The Next Big GoalLinking Insight to Action: The Next Big Goal

I've had a number of conversations in recent days around the theme of linking analysis to action. There's lots of frustration out there, understandably, because managers and executives increasingly have plenty of tools that spot problems -- reports, alerts, dashboards, KPIs, scorecards, etc. -- but they're not connected to levers that enable them to take action.As described by James Taylor, director of product marketing for analytic software tools at Fair Isaac, "there's a lot of interest in dashboards and BAM tools, but people tend to have very limited ability to go change system behavior." Taylor says Fair Isaac customers are thinking about ways to match their Blaze Advisor business rules environments with monitoring environments, and he adds that partner webMethods has seen similar interest now that it has embedded Blaze into its Fabric 7 business process management (BPM) suite.

Also in the business process management camp, Greg Carter, CTO at Metastorm, says business performance management vendors (the other BPM) are "extremely thirsty to unite measurement, analysis and aggregation of performance data to actually executing business processes and being able to go from information to action."

It seems rather obvious, but the connections are still lacking and in most cases they're too far removed from executives and business users. Hands-on, business-user-friendly systems such as business process and rules management environments will be a big part of the answer.I've had a number of conversations in recent days around the theme of linking analysis to action. There's lots of frustration out there, understandably, because managers and executives increasingly have plenty of tools that spot problems -- reports, alerts, dashboards, KPIs, scorecards, etc. -- but they're not connected to levers that enable them to take action.