At a recent International Institute for Analytics Symposium, I chatted with Satish Padiyar of HCSC about Decision Intelligence. I thought I would share a few nuggets from that conversation as the role of Decision Intelligence in Business Automation was a big part of what we discussed.

• Decision Intelligence involves Decision Support, Decision Automation and Decision Augmentation. Everyone does Decision Support. Decision Automation is well understood, if less widely delivered. There are two areas of confusion:
  • These are pillars not layers - you don't progress from Support to Augmentation to Automation, you pick a suitable approach for each decision.
  • Decision Augmentation is more than just Decision Support on steroids - it involves formally defining the role of both human and machine, then integrating them into a whole.
• HCSC has data, analytics and BI capabilities but sees adding a Decision Intelligence capability as essential to translate insight into value because value requires action - decisions.
• This new capability requires some established technologies - not just new #machinelearning and #artificialntelligence capabilities from tools like those in #CloudPakforData but established ones like #DecisionAutomation using #CloudPakforBusinessAutomation or #OperationalDecisionManager(ODM) 
• Mostly what Decision Intelligence requires is a focus on decision-making and repeatable decisions as something to identify, model (using a standard notation like #DMN ), automate and manage. It's not about rules or analytics, its about decisions.
• Decision Intelligence really changes how you work with data and #analytics as it focuses on moving from "right to left" - from the decision that must be improved back to the data not from the data to some proposed solution. It creates a pull for new analytics (to improve a decision) v a data-centric push. As Satish said - "the last mile becomes the first mile"
• In the end, the key skill is this ability to conceptualize repeatable decisions so they can be modeled, automated, augmented and improved.

#decisionintelligence is going to be critical moving forward. Time to learn some new skills :)