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Valentine's Day: Rational Romance and Operational Decision Management

I’m not
much for Valentine’s Day, but I’m naturally fascinated by the laws or luck of
attraction, fatal or forever. For me, this idle fascination goes beyond biology
and genetic pressure, I pay attention because human couplings are hot beds of
decision making (no pun intended) – from finding the near-perfect match to
preventing nothing short of a chemical disaster.

So on the
eve of another Hallmark holiday, this one for lovers, I started to think about
how better decision management could lead to better decision making in how
people select mates -- how
to apply what operational decision management (ODM) technologies (i.e., business rules and events) do for businesses to the business of love. I’m imagining
a custom ODM App that would help people prevent sub-optimal decision
making in the throes of hormonal, emotional, cultural or circumstantial biases
by applying a consistent set of automated rules and responses based on detached wisdom. A smart Love Coach.

In applying intelligent decision automation capabilities to date selection, you
would embed your expert knowledge of what you want in a mate as rules in the
system. You could even bring in the outside expertise and wisdom of friends, family or
therapists to determine the right conditional rules and responses based on your
goals and preferences. For example, you would be able to write a rule, in
natural language, that specified: “If person has never been married and age is >
45 years and friends and domestic pets number < 3, then reject (no matter how much he or she makes you laugh)." Or you could easily and quickly change that rule based on
new information or social conditions to: “If person has never been married and
age is > 45 years and profession is doctor/yoga instructor/fire fighter and time spent
on dating sites is < 6 months, then trigger evaluation over coffee.”

You could even set up the system so that it monitors your emotional and physical states
and makes automatic recommendations based on specified goals and conditions.
For example, if your hours of sleep fall below a certain threshold for a
specified length of time, you receive an alert that the quality of your
decision making has been impaired and you should avoid any sleepovers.

This post
is a bit tongue-in-cheek but its intent is to underscore one of real benefits of ODM to
businesses – the ability to take any bias out of the transaction or interaction,
whether it be with a customer, supplier, partner or employee, because the
decision logic is based on the detached wisdom of your subject matter experts
and then applied consistently, within context, across processes and
applications.

In writing
this, I was reminded of a 2011 post on James Taylor’s blog titled “Eliminating
bias and valuing customers with Decision Management Systems." It's a post about
a loyal customer’s disappointment with a company; a post that asked the
question “Would a decision management system have tried to charge me $60 to
change a light bulb (and lost my business)?”The answer was no. The answer is no. A decision management system
wouldn’t charge a loyal customer $60 to change a light bulb and risk losing her
business if it was based on the automated wisdom of its business experts and in the context of historical data. This
is why decision management systems are needed in any decision-intensive areas of human endeavor where success relies of the quality and timing of frequently occurring decisions; where the desired outcome can be derailed by inconsistent and inaccurate application of policy to those decisions.

And if there ever is a custom Love Coach App based on intelligent decision
automation technology, it wouldn’t recommend that you over-ride your own expert dating policies for a primitive response or circumstantial yearning (unless, of course, you established the right conditions for such an
exception).