Is your legacy modernization program just “forward to the 70s”?

February 4, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ

Phil Murphey, over at Forrester, had a post on  Apps Modernization – What are Your Top Priorities in 2010/11? that reminded me I wanted to write about modernization a little before the year got too far advanced. As Phil says the coming years are going to be really interesting:
Leading edge technologies will become [...]

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New article on smarter systems

February 3, 2010

My latest column on BR Community has been published – “Smarter Systems:  Action-oriented, Flexible, Predictive, Learning,”
Business Rules Journal, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Feb. 2010), URL:  http://www.BRCommunity.com/a2010/b524.html
Enjoy

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Coming soon – Predictive Analytics World

February 2, 2010

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
Predictive Analytics World, February 16-17, 2010 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco is turning into the biggest yet. I am going to be speaking on analytic journeys and giving a workshop on putting predictive analytics to work and there are some great keynotes from Andreas Weigen (ex-amazon.com), Kim Larsen (Charles Schwab) and [...]

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A decision-centric platform supports collaboration

January 29, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.
Finally the platform must allow effective collaboration between all the various groups involved in decision making. The IT department that runs the operational systems, the business people who make decisions and set policy, the executives who drive strategy and even the analytic team [...]

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A decision-centric platform delivers traceability

January 28, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.
Because compliance is essential in decision making, the traceability of decisions and decision making logic to the organization’s objectives, regulations and policies is essential. Business users changing decision making must understand how that change will impact the organization, how it supports the organization’s [...]

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A decision-centric platform integrates case management

January 27, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.
Not only must the platform support complex and potentially long-running cases, it must do so in a decision- and automation-centric way. It is not enough for the platform to support the definition of complex cases and their tracking and management over time. It [...]

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Operational decision making as a corporate asset

January 27, 2010

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
I often tell companies and other organizations that they should treat decisions and decision making as assets. In Smart (Enough) Systems, the book I wrote with Neil Raden, we said
Operational Decision Making as a Corporate Asset
If operational decisions must be made well for your organization to deliver on its strategy, they [...]

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A decision-centric platform supports automation

January 26, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.
Decision-centric organizations try to automate decisions where possible so any platform must allow the automation of decisions. Plugging decisions into high throughput, rapid response, transactional systems must be possible and real-time decision making supported. In addition the platform must provide automated support for [...]

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Business Analytics in Operations

January 26, 2010

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
I am working with the folks at B-eye Network and sponsors Oracle, SAS, Aha!, Adaptive and Fuzzy Logix on some research – Business Analytics: Putting Analytics To Work.There is growing interest in the power of analytics, especially predictive analytics, to improve business operations. The use of data mining and analytic techniques in operational [...]

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Working down-under

January 26, 2010

Anyone with project management/rules/decisioning experience interested in working in Australia this year, drop me a note james@decisionmanagementsolutions.com as I might have an opportunity for you.

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Book Review – Analytics at Work

January 26, 2010

I received a pre-release copy of Tom Davenport’s new book Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results. The book is a follow-on to Competing on Analytics (reviewed here) and is a shorter, pithier book than its predecessor. Once again Tom collaborates with Jeanne Harris and this time Robert Morison of the Concours group. Where the [...]

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A decision-centric platform focuses on decisions

January 25, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.
First and foremost a suitable platform must focus on decisions. It must support the definition of the decisions involved in running a business separate from the processes and functions that are involved. It should allow the business logic, the rules or semantics, of [...]

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First Look – Wolf Frameworks PaaS

January 25, 2010

Wolf Frameworks is a USA/India PaaS company started in 2006 as a pure play cloud computing platform. They have a front end (AJAX) using XML to communicate to a .NET backend on C#. They have about 3,000 plus people designing software using the platform and have about 13 plus solution providers covering 7 countries. They [...]

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Other characteristics of decision-centric organizations

January 21, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
Decision-centric organizations also focus on automating, not just supporting, decisions. They use this focus to develop simpler, standard processes and to become more event-driven. With decisions at the forefront, organizations need to change their thinking about automation. Instead of regarding information systems as simple stores of information that people use, they need to [...]

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Business processes and decisions – an emerging consensus?

January 21, 2010

Bruce Silver wrote a couple of interesting posts on this topic – Integrating Process and Rules – Part 1 and Part 2. Reading Bruce’s posts, and thinking back on the various posts I have written about business process and business decision management (Risks of pursuing BPM without decisioning, Adding decisioning to your BPM initiative or [...]

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Decision-centric organizations focus on decisions

January 20, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
The first critical characteristic of a decision-centric organization, obviously enough, is a focus on decisions instead of processes or functions. The decisions an organization makes, the actions it selects from the possible alternatives are critical. Decisions are what make strategy real and drive results and performance against metrics. Implementing a strategy defined at [...]

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A decision-centric organization

January 19, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
This week I thought I would write about decision-centric organizations. Organizations face many challenges in today’s business climate. Organizations whose success or failure is determined by the decisions they make (which claims to pay, which customers to target, which transactions to investigate for fraud) are handicapped by systems that are centered on processes [...]

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First Look – SAS Real Time Decision Manager

January 19, 2010

SAS Real-Time Decision Manager (RDM) is designed for inbound communications, complementing outbound communication solutions. It aims at real-time delivery of decisions and recommendations during a customer interaction to optimize that interaction to improve revenue, growth and retention. For example, in retail banking, a customer might come in with a new job with very different income [...]

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Progress Software and Savvion

January 14, 2010

I got a briefing from my friends at Savvion and their new colleagues at Progress Software (Savvion is being acquired by Progress).
Progress has been positioning itself around operational responsiveness – responding to opportunities and threats in real time, to what’s happening right now: What are competitors doing right now and can we adjust pricing, what [...]

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First Look – Aha

January 14, 2010

I got a chance to catch up with Aha! recently. Aha! is based in the Denver Tech Center and was founded back in 2006. Aha!’s premise is that it is now possible to build analytics into a platform and to focus on how to operationalize predictive models and deliver analytics within business processes. Initial customers [...]

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