From the yearly archives:

2008

First Look – Sonetto Retail

December 29, 2008

I got a briefing on IVIS Group’s Sonetto product this week. Sonetto is most famous as the platform for Tesco’s multi-channel strategy. Sonetto is a product designed to focus on multi-channel operations, especially (but not exclusively) multi-channel retail. They make the very valid point that multi-channel retail is complex. Not only do retailers have multiple [...]

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Merry Christmas

December 24, 2008

That’s it for me – off to the mountains this week. More posts in the new year. Meanwhile don’t forget to change your feed over to feeds.feedburner.com/jtonedm. Happy Holidays.

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All Predictive Models Are Wrong – So What?

December 22, 2008

I was struck by an article on Insurance and Technology titled All Predictive Models Are Wrong. Now, while this is a true statement (more or less) it reminds me of a famous Winston Churchil quote:
It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.
In other [...]

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Have you changed your feed yet?

December 20, 2008

Just a quick reminder that if you want to keep reading the blog in 2009 you will need to change your feed from feeds.feedburner.com/smartenoughsystems to feeds.feedburner.com/jtonedm. For now it is automatically redirecting but that will only last a couple more weeks.

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Predictive Analytics are important no matter what IBM thinks

December 19, 2008

Doug Henschen had a blog post on IBM today that caught my eye – Will IBM Add Analytics to its Toolbelt? in which he quoted Ambuj Goyal (who heads up information management at IBM) as saying predictive analytics are overrated. Sadly this reminded me of the old days of IBM – when FUD (fear, uncertainty [...]

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Decision management is critical for successful e-prescription

December 19, 2008

MSNBC had an interesting article on Docs to get bonus pay for e-prescriptions. The article had a great comment:
The biggest reason for the paperless push is to improve safety. More than 1.5 million Americans are injured every year by medication mistakes. Deciphering doctors’ chicken-scratch — was that 100 milligrams or 100 micrograms? — does play [...]

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Decision Services as agile, intelligent agents

December 19, 2008

Two articles I saw recently (Is SOA Enabling Intelligent Agents? and Three Keys to Enabling Agile Business Services) made me think about decision services in the context of agility and of so-called “intelligent agents”. Clearly SOA, web 2.0 and network-centric…

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Predictions for 2009

December 18, 2008

I just went back to check and found no predictions on the blog for 2008 (so I get a 100% accuracy rating with no errors) so I thought I would make some for 2009. In no particular order then:

Cloud computing will impact decision management.
There are already at least two decision management vendors offering decisions in [...]

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Save the Date and exciting news about the EDM Summit

December 18, 2008

The EDM Summit is going to Las Vegas, Nov 1-5, 2009
Mark Your Calendars!
The 2009 event will be bigger and better than ever. In addition to the usual focus on business rules and intelligent decisioning (chaired by yours-truly), there are going to be a Business Alignment Symposium and “How-To” Project Labs to deliver [...]

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If IT can’t get you there, perhaps decision management can

December 18, 2008

Dick Lee had an interesting post titled We Know Where We’re Going, But IT Can’t Get Us There. He made a number of points of which three stood out: Business often fails to communicate effectively to IT Poor process definition…

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Predictive Analytics World

December 18, 2008

I am going to be speaking at a show in San Francisco in the spring called Predictive Analytics World. I am going to speak on From Predictive Analytics to Competing on Decisions on the first day. I will also be…

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Customer Centricity Strategy #3 – Mass Customization

December 17, 2008

Wrapping up my responses to John Schmidt’s post on Customer Centricity with a discussion of Mass Customization. John describes this as managing trade-offs and building sophisticated models to customize your response to each and every customer based on their value…

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Customer Centricity Strategy #2 – Process Integration

December 17, 2008

Continuing my responses to John Schmidt’s post on Customer Centricity with a discussion of Process Integration. John describes this as focusing on cross-channel integration using Enterprise Service Bus/SOA technologies to bring data to the point of interaction. Decision management, of…

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Customer Centricity Strategy #1 – Customer Analytics

December 17, 2008

John Schmidt over on the Informatica blog had a great post on Customer Centricity that gave me a theme for three posts this week. He identified three approaches, each one of which I want to map to decision management. First…

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Can the business use decision management technology without IT help?

December 16, 2008

Inspired by a post of Jim Sinur’s – Can the Business Really Use BPM Technologies Without Help? – I started thinking about the decision management corollary: Can the business use decision management technology without help?
Regular readers will know that I often refer to the dirty secret of business rules:
Business users don’t want to “maintain rules” [...]

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Wordpress upgrade

December 13, 2008

I upgraded to Wordpress 2.7 this weekend plus I removed some categories and replaced them with tags (to shorten the category list), added a tag cloud (lower right column) and fixed problems with the images. If you find any problems, drop me a line.

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Microtrends and a new column in the WSJ

December 11, 2008

I worked with Kinney Zalesne back when I was speaking about decision management on the Silverlink product tour (I blogged about it here). She and Mark Penn have just started a new column in the WSJ called Microtrends (the same name as their book – Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes – which [...]

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It’s not AI but…

December 10, 2008

Albert Wenger had an interesting post today Human Vs. Machine 2 in which he discussed the fact that some of the old AI promises may be starting to come true. While I am not sure I 100% agree with his characterization of Netflix’s recommendation engine as AI, I do see what he means.
The over promising [...]

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Nice article on EDM

December 9, 2008

Joe McKendrick wrote a nice article on how EDM give companies a competitive edge for the Teradata Magazine this month. Joe did a nice job, as usual, of bringing out some key points and quoting me. My two favorite quotes were:
In addition, it’s inherently difficult to build actionable intelligence into most existing applications. “Enterprise applications [...]

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The future of Data Warehouses

December 9, 2008

An article caught my eye in the Teradata Magazine this month – Steve Brobst, CTO of Teradata, outlined 4 areas he thinks will drive data warehousing: Sensor Technology Pervasive BI In Database AnalyticsNon-Traditional Data Types I don’t disagree with Steve…

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