Analytics in the call center

March 18, 2010

IBM announced an interesting new analytic product today – RAMP or Real-time Analytic Matching Platform. The idea behind this is to improve on the approaches currently used to route calls which typically rely on an availability-based approach to connect customers to agents. This doesn’t take an agent’s focus or availability nor what a customer is [...]

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How to get smarter with Decision Management

March 18, 2010

I wrote an article on the basic steps to Decision Management for BR Community this month and you can check it out here: How to Get Smarter with Decision Management. BR Community requires a (free) registration and is well worth it for those interested in business rules.

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Update from SAP Co-CEOs

March 15, 2010

Got a quick update today from the new co-CEOs of SAP – Bill McDermott and Jim Hagemann Snabe.
Jim focused on their innovation strategy – making significant steps into on-demand business applications, aiming to support a hybrid approach allowing customers to mix on-demand and on-premise software. In addition they aim to increase support for running the [...]

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Thoughts on Pega acquiring Chordiant

March 15, 2010

The news today is that Pegasystems (rules-based business process management) is acquiring Chordiant (decision-centric CRM). This is interesting news as it merges a company (Chordiant) with a very decision-centric/decision services separate from process mindset with one (Pega) that has mixed rules and process together much more.
Chordiant have been one of my companies to watch for [...]

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Some thoughts on perfect application development

March 10, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
John Reynolds had an interesting post a little while back where he shared some thoughts on Perfect development tools. His emphasis was on support for things like iterative and test-driven development but it seems to me that there is also a need to move application development beyond code.
While developers do need development environments [...]

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Predictive analytics – some tips

March 5, 2010

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
In a great post on 8 things to keep in mind on predictive analytics, some folks from Diamond Management & Technology laid out some things to keep in mind that I really liked. Here they are with my comments – you can get more detail on each from the series of posts [...]

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Oracle Data Mining on the Amazon compute cloud

March 3, 2010

I just heard from a colleague that you can check out Oracle’s Data Mining tools on the amazon.com compute cloud.  The Oracle Data Mining development team has set up an instance for prospective customers who want to try the in-database data mining algorithms via SQL/Java APIs or the Oracle Data Miner user interface. You can [...]

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New SAP BPM/business rules book coming

March 3, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
I am working with some folks at SAP on a new BPM book – Applying Real-World BPM in an SAP Environment. I am working on chapters about the role of decisions in processes (check out this post for some help on this topic) and on the use and management of business [...]

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A story about the power of rules to improve analytic decisions

March 2, 2010

I was traveling in South Africa last week (keynoting BI 2010) and my favorite online payment system demonstrated not once but twice, why business rules are so valuable in analytic decision making. First their analytics triggered a fraud alert – presumably based on patterns of problems from South African IP addresses. As I was trying [...]

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In-database analytics – a white paper

February 25, 2010

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
My co-author on Smart (Enough) Systems, Neil Raden, has written a great white paper on in-database analytics that is available from Sybase – Analytics from the start. This paper introduces the key concepts, discusses some of the key issues (our book contains more tips in this area) and describes some strong case examples. [...]

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Great interview with Deepak Advani of IBM

February 24, 2010

Doug Henschen has a great interview with Deepak Advani of IBM, the new head of IBM’s newly acquired SPSS business (and I am not just saying that because he mentions Smart (Enough) Systems).  I am looking forward to seeing what IBM does with the combination of ILOG and SPSS, along with InfoSphere, WebSphere, FileNet and [...]

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BI 2010 – Optimizing revenue collection

February 24, 2010

Eugene from SARS, the South African Revenue Service, presented next on how SARS is using BI in revenue collection. He began by pointing out that there is a difference in how public sector organizations use BI – a focus on service delivery not profits, on taxpayers not customers, enforcement campaigns not marketing campaigns and so [...]

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BI 2010 – Optimizing revenue collection

February 24, 2010

Eugene from SARS, the South African Revenue Service, presented next on how SARS is using BI in revenue collection. He began by pointing out that there is a difference in how public sector organizations use BI – a focus on service delivery not profits, on taxpayers not customers, enforcement campaigns not marketing campaigns and so [...]

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BI 2010 – BI Competency Centers

February 24, 2010

Two presenters (Saroj from Standard Bank and Angela from Investec) discussed Business Intelligence Competency Centers to start day 2.
A BICC is a centralized team that captures knowledge, addresses technology, helps manage organizational change and defines common processes for BI across the organization. Repeatability is critical – not having to re-invent things for each new project. [...]

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Rules discovery in decisions

February 23, 2010

Alan Fish has another great post over on his blog – DRA: Rules Discovery. He makes what I consider to be an essential point that is easily forgotten – you are not trying to find rules just so you know what they are, you are finding rules so you can make better decisions! Check out [...]

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BI 2010 – Some thoughts on data quality and governance

February 23, 2010

Several sessions this afternoon on data quality and governance. Rather than blogging these separately, here are some thoughts:

Great illustration of data quality problem having a business impact – bad data led a Telco to prepare a large CapEx project to add bandwidth capacity but a physical inspection showed plenty of actual capacity. Bad data had [...]

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BI 2010 – Successfully incorporating geospatial data

February 23, 2010

Melanie du Plessis from the electoral commission was next. The IEC focuses on ensuring that elections are free and fair. One of the key elements of this is a focus on a single national register of voters that everyone appears on once and only once. Divided up the country into voting districts, to one of [...]

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BI 2010 – BI and Performance Management

February 23, 2010

Continuing at BI 2010, Jon Hill spoke on the combination of BI and Performance Management. Jon reiterated the constantly changing environment and the tendency of companies to spend large amounts of money on data infrastructure without thinking through the way this investment will make a difference. In one extreme example he had seen one company [...]

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BI 2010 – Making BI more strategic

February 23, 2010

I have just opened ITWeb’s BI 2010 in Johannesburg talking about decisions and importance of decision making in making BI matter (I will post my slides later). Great audience, nearly 200 people with a strong showing from end user customers (75%) and, very interestingly, nearly half considered themselves business / IT straddlers which is a [...]

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Two more analytics jobs

February 22, 2010

I recently spoke to an interesting company getting serious about analytics and looking for some staff. Drop me a line james@decisionmanagementsolutions.com if you are interested and I will forward your resume along:

Data Mining / Analytics Business Analyst
Senior Business Analyst with data mining and predictive analytics experience to lead the establishment of a decision support system [...]

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