“The substitute for Business Intelligence is called Decision Intelligence” was the headline in an article on the Danish IT site Version2 last month. The article was an interview with Michael Borges, head of Copenhagen based data management system integrator Platon. The article is introduced in English on Platon’s Australia site.
The term Decision Intelligence as a successor for Business Intelligence (BI) has been around for a while. In an article from 2008 Claudia Imhoff and Colin White explains what Decision Intelligence does that Business Intelligence don’t. Very simplified it is embracing and integrating operational Business Intelligence, traditional Data Warehouse based Business Intelligence and (Business) Content Analytics.
It is said in the article: “This, of course, has implications for both data integration and data quality. This aspect of decision intelligence will be covered in a future article.” I haven’t been able to find that future article. Maybe it’s still pending.
Anyway, certainly this – call it Decision Intelligence or something else – has implications for data quality.
The operational BI side is about supporting, and maybe have the systems making, decisions based on events taking place here and now based on incoming transactions and related master data. This calls for data quality prevention at data collection time opposite to data cleansing downstream which may have served well for informed decisions in traditional Data Warehouse based BI.
The content analysis side, which according to Imhoff/White article includes information expertise, makes me consider the ever recurring discussion in the data quality realm about the difference between data quality and information quality. Maybe we will come to an intelligent decision on that one when Business Intelligence is succeeded by Decision Intelligence.
Liliendahl on Data Quality 
While I agree that a focus on decisions is essential to understand and use any analytic technology, I find it helpful to differentiate between decision support technologies (designed to support a human decision maker) and decision management technologies (designed to automate decisions and embed that automation in operational systems). My focus is on the use of technology to manage and automate decisions but an understanding of your organization’s decisions can only help whether you plan to automate them or not.
Talking of Platon and of Copenhagen I am actually speaking at IM 2011 in Copenhagen, Platon’s conference, on “From Business Intelligence to Decision Management”
James
Thanks for commenting James. Good to see that you will be in Copenhagen delivering a keynote on the Platon conference. I’ve been there several times in the past.
Aiming at supporting decisions or having the system making decisions is also a core question in my comfort zone being data matching.