I have been thinking lately about decision support in business settings. Executives and managers make many, many decisions a day about the business – most of them involving other people that need to either be part of the decision making process, or act on the decisions. Essentially as an executive, you gather some data, meet with some people, make some decisions and then fire off some emails (or phonecalls) - repeat. From my experience, most processes in an organization are of this ad hoc flavor – and really have no tools (except email) for supporting the end-to-end process (from an ad-hoc set of decisions, through execution and finally to results)

There are various tools that help with the steps – for example I remember in the late eighties\early ninties decision support systems (DSS) used to be all the rage. The problem was that executives were unwilling to use the systems and they morphed into the Business Intelligence (BI) tools that all are the rage today (at least based on the number of acquisitions going on in that space). But, both DSS and BI tools address only part of the decision process – gathering and analyzing the data so that an intelligent decision can be arrived at. So those tools help with the “gather some data” part.

Another set of tools are collaboration tools, which can help somewhat with both the “meet some people” and “make some decisions” part. Other tools like Excel, Word, Powerpoint and email also play an important part in these steps. Most executives I know don’t use the various collaboration tools that are available - they use meetings, secretaries and productivity applications. Maybe they’ll start using Wikis too, but as another productivity tool - not an end-to-end decision support system.

Now if you believe the Business Process Management vendors the final step should be to create a process using your easy to use BPM design tool, and then have the process execute using your BPM (hey maybe even BPEL) engine. Yeah, right. BPM tools are heavy duty tools for the IT department, and are used to string together various IT assets. They don’t support the ad-hoc nature of most business processes, or the heavy (or perhaps exclusive) human interactions needed. Even the emerging area of Human-Centric Business Process Management (as coined by Forrestor) doesn’t fit the bill – they really don’t support the ad-hoc nature of most processes in an organization.

So where does that leave us? Essentially with meetings, email (sometimes phone calls and faxes) and productivity tools (ala Excel, Powerpoint, Word). That is how most business and business processes are done. I think this is main cause of email overload in organizations – and until some more natural mechanism for managing these ad-hoc business processes come along – the overload will only get worse…

An interesting article on email overload from First Monday.

Stumble it!

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 1:51 am and is filed under VC, enterprise 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.