Decisions and Consequences (Link to analyst Blog)

My company DecisionPath develops software for decision support, called ForeTell. ForeTell provides modeling, “what-if” simulation, and analysis capabilities. Organizations use ForeTell to explore how their situations are likely to evolve and how candidate strategies to better position themselves for those futures are likely to play out.

ForeTell is related to a category of software called Business Intelligence (BI). BI products offer important benefits, including the following:

• Aggregating data from diverse organizational sources (e.g., data warehouses)
• Summarizing and visualizing data for improved accessibility (e.g., reporting, executive dashboards and performance scorecards)
• Identifying interesting patterns or trends (e.g., data mining, predictive trending).
  

In essence, BI offers improved situational awareness, which amounts to visibility into current status and past performance. Or, in terms of this blog’s focus, BI highlights what has changed in the past and what seems to be changing today. (Some statistical tools enable predictive trending, but such BI projections are only reliable if situations are not changed very much, such as short-term projections of market demand.) Similarly, military command and control (C2) systems drive situational awareness in battlefield settings.

As financial prospectuses are fond of noting, past performance is no guarantee of future results (particularly over the long term). Good decision-making involves leveraging the products of situational awareness in a (structured!) process of analyzing likely changes in the future and anticipating the consequences of interventions to impact those changes. ForeTell addresses this need for decision support, which complements BI’s attention on improving situational awareness.
Fern Halper is a long-time observer of the BI market sector, covering end user needs, technology, companies and their products. Fern works at Hurwitz Associates, a well-known Information Technology analyst organization. I corresponded with Fern recently about an entry from her blog, and ended up briefing her on ForeTell. I invite you to read her assessment of ForeTell (http://fbhalper.wordpress.com/2008/01/18/decisions-and-consequences/) and her commentary on BI in general (http://fbhalper.wordpress.com/).