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I saw an interesting article on DM Direct (DM Review's email newsletter) today - Leveraging Decision Automation in Database Administration.

In it Venkat Devraj makes an interesting case for using decision automation, what I would call decision management, to automate database administration tasks. His notes about why scripts are a rotten approach to this kind of automation are perfect and apply to all possible uses of decision management.

Staying on an IT operations front it made me wonder what else might be amenable to decision management. How about these:

• Network reconfiguration when equipment is added/removed/fails


• Engineer assignment to problem equipment using location, urgency, skills etc


• Monitoring the network to see which service level agreements are going to be breached and proactively informing the agreement holders


• Routing helpdesk calls based on source, urgency etc


• Managing backup schedules using rules and predictive analytics to optimize the approach


• Self-service diagnostics for patches and versions to help people set up valid stacks (like Sun Preventive Services for instance)

I am sure there are others but these were just ones that popped into my head based on customers, especially in telecommunications. I am not sure what the prompt for using EDM to manage these might be (in terms of scale) but an IT department that believed in the approach and was having a hard time selling it to the business might consider them as internal proof points.

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