In Jan-2017 Mike Gualtieri from Forrester published a report “Prescriptive Analytics: The Black Belt Of Digital Decisions” which tied Analytics to actionable Decisions. Mike wrote: “Enterprises must stop wasting time and money on unactionable analytics. These efforts don’t matter if the resulting analytics don’t lead to better insights and decisions that are specifically linked to measurable business outcomes.” Since then the term “prescriptive analytics” was replaced with “Decision Intelligence” but the listed technologies became even more important today:

• Descriptive analytics: enables analytics users within an enterprise to query data integrated from multiple applications
• Predictive analytics: creates predictive models
• Streaming analytics: detects events and patterns in real-time streams of data
• Search and knowledge discovery: leads to insights, and insights lead to knowledge
• Simulation: imitates a real-world process or system over time using a computer model
• Mathematical optimization: the process of finding the optimal solution to a problem that has numerically expressed constraints
• Machine learning: identify patterns or make predictions by analyzing historical data that is representative of the domain
• Pragmatic AI: continuously learn from new information, build knowledge, and then use that knowledge to make decisions and interact with people and/or other machines. LINK