Customer Reviews

Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions

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James Taylor knows the Enterprise Decision Making space and has a lot to teach the rest of us. The first several chapters make an excellent business case for the use of decision systems. I found myself underlining and marking content on several pages. His message, however, gets muted by his disjointed writing style, a problem compounded by a poor graphic layout. The disjointedness is mostly a distraction in the first few chapters, but becomes more critical as the content becomes deeper and more technical. (One of my current job responsibilities is leading a business rules system implementation at my company.)

I've been in the enterprise software business for a long time, and for a long time I've had several related intuitions about how requirements, rules and SOA fit together. But frankly, I never managed to get to a coherent whole about them. Many times while reading this book I kept saying "yes of course, why didn't I think of that?" There are so many excellent insights in this book.

Taylor and Raden may have created a new movement with this work in Enterprise Operational Decision Management. The central theme is that organizations are known by the decisions they make, and not just the major strategic decisions, but the myriad small decisions that their thousands of employees make on a day to day basis. Up until now we had to make due with Decision Support, Knowledge Management, Business Intelligence, Data Warehouses and other off-line aids for manual decision making. In the last few years the maturation of Rules Management systems and the near universal adoption of SOA, Work Flow and BPM are making it possible to more the entire decisioning process into real time, whether human assisted or fully automated.

Two other profound ideas I want to comment on are the champion/ challenger concept, and the role of hypothesis and prediction. Each alone is worth the price of the book.

The champion/challenger concept says once you have a decision model in place and working you owe it to yourself to constantly challenge it by setting up a series of alternate models and running some percent of the decision flow through the challenger model and testing the outcome against the current (champion) scenario. This wasn't really viable until the advent of SOA. They make a great case for how this arrangement allows firms to continually improve their decision making.

A traditional rule system runs off what the experts think the best thing to do in the face of uncertainty. But unless and until a system makes predictions about the outcome of its decisions and closes the loop with the actual results (which of course are often not known for quite some time) it will not be able to improve. This is the heart of their prediction driven decision model.

The book is obviously based on a wealth of information: there must be nearly 100 case study/vignettes sprinkled throughout emphasizing the points just made.

Excellent and inspiring piece of work.

Smart Enough Systems is a book with one foot in two worlds. At one level, it is a business book addressing the issues of using information and decision support. On the other level it is almost a BI/DSS for the less intelligent in terms of its step by step guidance on working through these issues. Fortunately the books premise regarding automating hidden decisions requires a bit of both.

As a business book, Smart Enough covers the need to explain the concepts in business terms and provide a framework for generating ROI. It does not talk in great depth about how decisions drive competitive advantage. It is also a little weak on the explanation of where to apply this technique as I doubt enterprises will make the funding available to automate all of their decisions.

As a technology book, the author focuses on Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) is the primary focus of this book and it is described as applying a services approach to decision making. This looks to take business rules out of IT systems and put them into something akin to a decision service broker/service so the same situations are handled with the same set of rules.

The book is a solid and complete explanation of the author's ideas. Taylor and Raden focus on the systems aspects of EDM and their automation. This leads into a discussion of decision types and how they are automated. Here Taylor and Raden do well to illustrate these concepts, although the reader often encounters graphics and statements that are more than a bit dated.

The book would have been greatly helped with a clear and consistent case study application of its concepts. It also would have benefited from understanding the nature of decision systems support (DSS) a discipline that has been around for more than 30 years which is only discussed in a single sentence and again from a technology perspective.

This is a solid book by a professional who certainly understands the technical implications of his ideas - enterprise decision management. However, by trying to stand in both worlds it excels in neither. I would recommend this book more as a technical and implementation guide rather than as an executive business book. In that regard it has a place in IT but probably not in the Boardroom.

Well structured and written, this book could be the first definitive bible for enterprise decision management (EDM). Taylor & Raden cover all the EDM bases; explaining its business need, core tenets, and technical underpinnings. However the authors avoid the temptation to dwell too much in technology detail, and manage to strike a nice balance with tips on practical implementation in real-world business environments and even offers a mini-methodology to help your company take its first step into the bold new world of EDM.

A must read for any company or IT practitioner that's frustrated with their current business intelligence and analytic systems and wants to focus more on value-creating decisions rather than managing data per se.

When we hear the word "systems" we naturally think of Information Technology - not a subject most CEOs, CFOs or CMOs care to deep dive into.

But Taylor & Raden have filled this book with such indisputable logic and so many engaging,relatable business cases that I recommend every CEO,CFO and CMO use it as a blueprint of how to close the business-to-IT-strategy gap.

When corporations are drowning in data yet starved for information on what customers want, in an increasingly competitive world, every company will benefit from this game-changing way of competing that the authors share here.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. This book reminds us that in a "Long Tail" world, the ultimate role of technology in a global economy is to recapture those time-honored business benefits we once could only find in the "corner store".


Jackie Bassett, CEO
BT Industrials, Inc.

Rules management really a big thing these days. It is one of the best technologies for lowering IT costs. Rules empower business users and subject matter experts to view, change and simulate change impact of rules in an enterprise. This book is packed with great ideas and a good overview of business rules management from "why rules?", rule harvesting, rule management and rule execution.

The excellent section on Rule Templates was a turning point for my cognition of how metadata registries can be used with rules engines. Conditionals can reference data elements and actions can change states of XML instances.

One of the two author's is Jim Taylor who is a VP at Fair Issac. Despite this fact the book does a pretty good job of looking at the rule process not a specific rules engine.

My only criticism with the book is it is very light on the topic of semantics, metadata registries and rules. There is a little coverage of the process of getting business users to write precise, concise definitions for business terms and the management and traceability of those definitions. A rule is only as good as the definitions for the business terms they reference. If you combine a good rules management system with an solid ISO/IEC 11179 metadata registry you can get the rule precision you need. Anything less could lead to chaos when everyone uses private definitions of business terms to express duplicate rules.

The late Adam Osborne, pioneer of the "transportable," all-in-one computer, once said that "adequacy is sufficient." James Taylor and his colleagues have broadened and deepened that deceptively simple-sounding concept, to the benefit of business decision-makers everywhere. Their clear, cogent observations and recommendations will help readers and their enterprises to focus business intelligence efforts more on decisions and decision-making, and less on "bits and bytes" and "speeds and feeds." Every business decision-maker -- especially those focused on business technology decisions and business-technology alignment -- should read this book, and make it part of the foundation of his or her business intelligence strategy.

A well written, useful book which I can apply in my daily work making our BI system more valueable and business-centric. Contains good recommendations and case studies -- will be one of the "bibles" on my BI shelf.

If you are interested in learning more about decision services and what James Taylor calls Enterprise Decision Management read his book Smart Enough Systems: How to Deliver Competitive Advantage by Automating Hidden Decisions - coauthored with Neil Raden. I expected to just skim though the book since I have worked with BREs on several projects. I ended up reading this excellent book cover to cover. It's loaded with best practices and case studies as well as:

* How to automate operational decisions
* How decision services fit into SOA
* Creating a closed loop process for decision improvement
* Assessing and maturing your decision services capabilities

As SOA matures we are finding new ways to architect systems and receiving benefits from SOA in unexpected ways. How often have you seen improvement of operational decisions listed as a SOA benefit?

This was from my blog post at:

it.toolbox.com/blogs/the-soa-blog/soa-decision-services-27156

Eric Roch

It seemed to me that the systems that run our business process are really controlled by a few elite IT professionals and programers. Unfortunately, they can't really be as responsive as they like our we need.

This book helps me to understand how my policies, rules and decisions can be lifted up a level where we can more directly influence.

Great read.