Smart Enough Systems

Ensuring the successful adoption of decision management technologies and approaches

Organizations adopting business rules, predictive analytics and data mining often struggle to move those technologies beyond their initial implementation. Despite success with business rules in individual projects, IT departments continue to develop most systems and services in procedural code. Localized success with data mining or predictive analytics is rarely leveraged into a broad-based adoption of the approaches. While specific business units become sophisticated analytic competitors, the focus of the enterprise remains on Business Intelligence, Performance Management and reporting.

An ODCC is a permanently organized, cross-functional team. It is owned and staffed by the organization, not consultants, and has defined tasks, roles, responsibilities and processes. Its purpose is to support and promote effective operational decision making, both manual and automated, across the organization. An ODCC:

• Maximizes the efficiency, use and quality of operational decision making all lines of business.

• Leads to higher success rates and greater value when implementing decision making technology

• Helps eliminate the gap between Business and IT

• Improves critical governance and reuse processes

• Collects and distributes best practices and provides mentoring to improve all projects

Smart (enough) Systems, as leading experts in the field of enterprise decision management and the adoption of business rules, data mining and predictive analytics, can help you develop and execute a plan to build an ODCC.

Project Deliverables

There are three key deliverables when developing an ODCC:

• ODCC Charter
  Includes proposed sponsors, organizational structure, staffing etc

• Adoption Plan
  A detailed outline of the steps to develop the ODCC from the current state

• Risks and Mitigation
  Identification of the key risks for the organization and recommended mitigation strategies

Methodology

The first step in implementing an ODCC is to understand an organization's business and decision management priorities. No two ODCCs are ever exactly the same as user skills, technology architecture and information delivery capabilities vary between organizations. Smart (enough) Systems consultants will assess your organization’s resources and maturity in a number of areas to determine the role, scope and functions of an ODCC that works for you. An ODCC might include a program office, data stewardship and information management, information delivery, analytics, business rules and adaptive control functions. Once this information is gathered, an ODCC Charter will be defined and discussed.

The second step is to determine a suitable adoption plan. Such a plan must be realistic about the current state and move the organization in manageable phases to the planned ODCC. The adoption plan is developed based on current organization, existing skills and experience and current levels of technology adoption in areas such as data warehousing, data integration, business rules, business intelligence, performance management, analytics and data mining. The plan includes details of technology that must be acquired, skills that must be brought in house and consulting expertise that will be required temporarily.

The final step is to identify the key implementation risks for the organization and to develop risk mitigation plans. Risks range from organizational to technical and are unique to each implementation. Based on the knowledge gained in writing the charter and plan, key risks are identified and specific risk mitigation strategies documented.