From the monthly archives:

August 2008

Shameless Commerce – Coming to Europe

August 28, 2008

I am going to be in Europe in October and I am looking to productively fill a couple of days in my schedule. I am available Friday the 3rd, Monday the 6th and possibly Wednesday the 8th. If you are based in the London – Paris – Brussels – Munich – Frankfurt area and are [...]

Read the full article →

A reader asks – what makes a company ready (for EDM)?

August 27, 2008

A reader had an interesting question this week. As a comment to Using decision management to deliver intelligent business performance he asked “What makes a company ready?”. I suspect my closing line “The products are, mostly, ready. Whether companies are is another question…” prompted this.
So, what makes a company ready for enterprise decision management – [...]

Read the full article →

links for 2008-08-27

August 27, 2008

Oracle Data Mining and Analytics: Data Mining in Action: Oracle Sales Prospector
Post about Oracle sales prospector on which I commented, wondering if this only worked fro manual review or if the insight could be injected into transactional decision making also.
(tags: oracle data mining sales predictive analytics)

Complex Event Processing (CEP) Blog » CEP vs. BRE [...]

Read the full article →

Next generation direct marketing with decision management

August 26, 2008

Elana Anderson had a great post on direct marketing while I was on vacation -Next Generation Campaign  Management.
She starts off with three great principles:

Listen to all information provided by customers and prospects – both explicit and implied.
Understand past and present information to determine the best possible marketing action.
Communicate in a compelling, timely, and relevant manner.

All [...]

Read the full article →

Neil Speaking at Brainstorm San Francisco

August 26, 2008

Neil has a new speaking gig – he is going to be speaking at Brainstorm San Francisco on “Applying Decision Management to Make Process Simpler, Smarter and More Agile”, October 1st in the morning. You can find the agenda here and register here.

Read the full article →

SOA Survey for you

August 25, 2008

A student of Information Systems for Business Performance at University College Cork, Ireland is  investigating how SOA can influence the IT capability of a firm and to what extent this strategy can become a major initiative for changing the underlying business approach of an organization. I offered to post the survey which should take no [...]

Read the full article →

Here’s why decision management matters to mobile marketing

August 21, 2008

Ginger Conlon had a little piece on mobile marketing that caught my eye. This post highlighted the growing importance of mobile devices as both a customer support channel and as a marketing vehicle. I completely agree with this assessment but I think it means that, for both customer service and marketing, we will have to [...]

Read the full article →

Using decision management for Governance, Risk and Compliance

August 20, 2008

A reader asked me to blog about GRC – governance, risk and compliance – this week and, in particular, the difference between IT governance and true business governance or what is broadly known as GRC. I have been thinking about this and will write some more posts when I get back from vacation but, for [...]

Read the full article →

Using Decision Management to power the call center of the future

August 19, 2008

Chris Skinner wrote a nice little piece on the Future Call Center over on the swift community. He had some nice examples, though he was focused on how the future call center might be using video. What struck me, though, was that decision making is critical to his example. Neither the avatar nor the video-linked [...]

Read the full article →

Here’s one way to institutionalize great service

August 18, 2008

David Rance had a nice piece on CustomerThink called Great Service Has to Be Institutionalized if It Is to Become the Norm. In this post he identifies decision making as important, which I think is true. Now his focus is on culture (very important) but mine is different. What if you used your systems to [...]

Read the full article →

On vacation

August 15, 2008

Well I am off to the mountains for a vacation with no email, no cell phone, no twitter and no blogging. I have queued up some posts for you so you won’t miss me too much but don’t expect a reply until after the 25th.
Have fun

Read the full article →

Here are some pressure points for business rules

August 15, 2008

Chris Berg wrote a nice piece on Pressure Points that seemed like it was worth highlighting. Chris outlines some great reasons for using business rules and he seems to Believe in business rules (as I do).

Read the full article →

Decision Management job (kinda) at Wachovia

August 14, 2008

Got another question about a job today. This time Jim Fahy sent me this one:
Director, Insight and Innovation Advanced Capabilities
The Insight and Innovation group combines a customer analysis group; research and targeting; and the analytics reporting and technology team formerly housed in a corporate customer service excellence structure.   The customer and market insights that [...]

Read the full article →

Warranty decisions are one reason iRobot’s outsourced call center doesn’t work as well as it should

August 13, 2008

I have been an iRobot customer since Christmas. Much as I like their products, their customer service decision making leaves a lot to be desired. This particular post was prompted by their inconsistent warranty decision management. iRobot has outsourced its call center, as many companies have, and sound like they want to deliver excellent customer [...]

Read the full article →

A reader asks about scorecards and why people use them

August 12, 2008

A reader sent me an interesting question after watching the ILOG seminar on scorecards and rules in which I participated earlier this week (recording of this rules and scorecards seminar is available). Here’s a summary of what he said:
One immediate comment I would have is that scorecarding seems to insert an extra unnecessary step. Rather [...]

Read the full article →

Business Rules, Domain-Specific Languages and Models

August 12, 2008

I saw this piece on DSL and MDE, necessary assets for Model-Driven approaches and it made me think about DSLs. First, here’s the definition of a DSL from the article
DSL is a programming language or executable specification language that offers, through appropriate notations and abstractions, expressive power focused on, and usually restricted to, a particular [...]

Read the full article →

A reader asks about business rules in Oslo

August 11, 2008

A reader asked me last week about how I saw business rules engines fitting in with UML, SOA and Microsoft. The article discusses whether Microsoft’s Oslo strategy for SOA will be based on UML or merely offer support for it among many standards.
First, let me say that I think it is increasingly clear that application [...]

Read the full article →

More on the IBM/ILOG Relationship

August 11, 2008

I got a briefing last week from IBM as part of my researching of the IBM/ILOG acquisition (I blogged about this here). Back when I was at IMPACT it became clear that IBM was getting focused on events, rules and policies – they talked about Points of Agility, points in a business where variability is [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – Tibco ActiveMatrix Service Performance Manager

August 8, 2008

I got a briefing this week from my friends at Tibco about their Service Performance Manager product released a couple of months ago. The product is a big step along the road to what some call “autonomic computing” in that it provides dynamic and automated monitoring and correction of service levels in a service-oriented world.
The [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – IDS Scheer ARIS Business Rule Designer

August 8, 2008

I had a chance to catch up with Marwane from IDS Scheer the other day and talk about ARIS, IDS Scheer’s enterprise modeling product. The ARIS architecture or platform has currently more than 25 products for enterprise modeling divided into 4 platforms (Strategy, design, implementation and controlling) and 6 solutions (Enterprise BPM, EA, SAP, [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries