Solid decision making is at the heart of any successful enterprise. High-level strategic decisions shape the future and trajectory of a business but the small operational decisions made every day every hour are just as important to a company’s success.

IBM Operational Decision Manager (ODM) helps businesses manage and simplify their decision-making processes and an advanced version of the product released this month takes the technology a step further helping businesses make proactive decisions in real-time and in context.

In a recent webcast hosted by the Global WebSphere Community IBM Technical Sales Specialist Laurent Clermont walked through the features of ODM Advanced 8.7 which he said automates and enhances daily decision-making processes.

“We are more focusing today on the small operational decisions. Those are small but they happen so often during a day during an hour maybe within minutes - all your business users are constantly making decisions.” he said. “So the idea is to be able to codify those. Those could be business policies they could be practices they could be regulations either imposed internally or imposed” externally.

Clermont said ODM makes decision-making automation accessible to business users in the enterprise – the ones who are best suited to make informed decisions.

“The idea is to really empower the business users to make changes to those policies because those people are the ones who know best what those policies are and being able to make changes directly is really what’s going to be able to empower them to move their business forward faster” Clermont said. “And ultimately the goal is to make those decisions automatically be taken by the software through the business users making changes to the rules.”

Where decisions are usually based in code and inaccessible to business users ODM allows for decisions to be written in plain English – or Chinese or German or Spanish or a number of other languages – which hands accessibility to business users.

Hard-coded rules can also often be difficult to change Clermont said. ODM takes the decision-making process and moves it outside the code enabling on-the-fly changes.

“We are externalizing the logic the business logic outside the code and allowing it to be read by everyone because it’s natural language” he said. “By externalizing it it’s easy to change.”

The decisions can also be used across the enterprise from mobile to legacy systems.

“By centralizing it we are able to reuse the decision” Clermont said. “The same decision can become systematically made across the board in your enterprise whether it’s from a mobile application a legacy application the same decisions will be made when it’s requested. Ultimately the goal is to really be able to automate more decisions than ever allowing business users to directly enter their knowledge into the system so they don’t have to make those decisions over and over again.”

The advanced version of ODM takes things a step further by making decisions context-aware which allows users to detect situations in real time and make decisions with predictive analytics.

The advanced version of the product also includes Decision Server Advanced a set of features that combines Decision Server Rules Decision Server Events and the new Decision Server Insights to make decisions in context.

“The advanced version is really about when to make the decision” Clermont said. “And it’s going to leverage both business rules as well as predictive analytics to be able to make those decisions again really at the moment they need to be made.”

The system also allows rules to be tested before being fully implemented so users can see what the impact will be on the business before deployment.

To learn more about IBM ODM 8.7 check out the webcast replay.