Business Decision Management (BDM) is an approach that allows organizations to move away from a reliance on systems to one utilizing business process, business rules, and business intelligence.  This integration – in design, implementation, and management – provides the necessary foundation for an Enterprise to truly focus on its business and recognize its decisions as true corporate assets. By focusing on the decisions that create value, companies become more profitable and more agile.

Companies emphasizing a BDM approach focus on their operational decisions, use business rules to manage those decisions and ultimately enable those decisions as services tied to their core business processes.

Business Decision Management solutions that automate, improve and connect decisions to enhance business performance are based on a number of technologies including:

• Business Rule Management Systems (BRMS)
  A Business Rule Management System is a system used to define, deploy, execute, monitor and maintain decision logic that is used by operational systems within an organization. This logic, often in the form of business rules, may be found in policies, requirements, manuals, legacy systems, and with subject matter experts. When treated as a true corporate asset it supports decisions that determine the tactical actions that take place in applications and systems – in other words, how the business does its job.
  
  
• Business Process Management Systems (BPMS)
  A Business Process Management System (BPMS) offers a way to build, execute and monitor automated processes that may go across organizational boundaries. More than just workflow, these systems offer a way to model, manage, monitor, and move between the core processes of an Enterprise. These truly define what the business does.
  
  
• Business Intelligence (BI)
  Business intelligence (BI) refers to skills, technologies, applications and practices used to help an organization acquire a better understanding of its commercial context. BI applications provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. Common functions of business intelligence applications include reporting, OLAP, analytics, data mining, and predictive analytics.
  
  
• Service-oriented Architectures (SOA)
  A service-oriented architecture (SOA) is the true “glue” of Business Decision Management. It provides methods for systems development and integration so interoperable services may be defined and packaged for use by all of the business processes of an organization.

How do you know if Business Decision Management is right for you? Today’s Enterprise finds itself at a crossroads. Faced with an economic climate never experienced in our lifetime it has become critically important to address long-standing issues and to become positioned for the marketplace to come. Addressing these common pain points is more important than ever:

• Lack of agility. Systems dictate business instead of business dictating systems.
• Business control. Business is in the hands of IT and not where it truly belongs – with the business
• High costs. A persistent reliance on expensive and often hard to find specialized technical resources.
• Compliance and Transparency. Core business logic is buried within legacy systems or resides in the heads of subject matter experts.
• Consistency. Projects are conducted in silos with little to no synchronization even across the most commonplace of terms or concepts.
• Aging Workforce. Large amounts of intellectual capital not captured in any maintainable fashion are rapidly walking out the door never to return.
  

Allegiance Advisory Group is well positioned to provide BDM services across these technology platforms with a wide variety of services. By partnering with leading software vendors we provide unparalleled support for everyone from organizations seeking to learn more about how BDM truly impacts their bottom line to the savvy Enterprise seeking to optimally leverage their current investment.

While there a wide range of solutions and support offered by AAG, customers typically focus on the following:

• Vendor platform evaluation, assessment, and selection
  At AAG we know the companies and their products and can help clients determine what technologies truly meet their needs.
  
  
• Methodology, design, process delineation, rule harvesting, and decision analysis
  AAG can assist clients in approaching their business from a BDM perspective – assisting with a high level process analysis as well as defining decisions at a low level. Business value is enhanced by understanding what the decisions are, how they should be captured, where they should be documented, and how they should ultimately be implemented.
  
  
• Implementation of BDM services (process, rule, analytics, SOA)
  AAG helps clients implement truly usable, manageable systems. By leveraging our experience and vendor partnerships you can be assured that you will have sound technical expertise. This results in a technical state emphasizing quality and consistency through the implementation cycle while fully – and optimally – integrating all facets of BDM.
  
  
• True business management of processes, rules and decisions
  AAG creates a framework for maintenance that allows new business decision management systems to take advantage of all the power that comes from modern business rules management systems (BRMS) and business process management systems (BPMS). This facilitates business control by creating an environment that has the right people, processes, and systems in place to accommodate rapid change.
  
  
• Effective governance through the creation of a Center of Excellence
  The Enterprise truly seeking agility will find that the oversight brought by a Center of Excellence is the key to success. AAG is uniquely poised to leverage their past work to help you lay out the foundation for and subsequently implement an effective BDM Center of Excellence.