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Gregory Piatetsky: How did you come up with this concept?

James Taylor The phrase came about from looking at successful systems that were "smart enough" and generalizing and formalizing what it was that made those systems successful. It was clear that the developers of these systems took this approach and applied these technologies, even if they used different words. You see people talking about specific vertical solutions (underwriting, claims, originations) that are built using this approach, about platforms for decision management or customer decision management, about best next action in CRM and so on. EDM is a reference to the common approach that underlies all these.

It seemed to us that these techniques and approaches had been applied in very narrow areas - ones where both the consequences of a bad decision and the complexity of the decision were high. This had made sense when computing power was scarce and expensive and when most companies had little or no data relevant to most decisions. Now companies have data in enormous quantities and computing power is cheap. Add to that the fact that more and more transactions are automated at some level and it is clear that what was once a narrowly focused approach should be applied more broadly. Giving the approach a name and being explicit about what it means is part of this.