From the monthly archives:

September 2008

New Community for Fair Isaac customers and others

September 30, 2008

The folks at Fair Isaac pointed me to a new community they have just released – dmtools.fairisaac.com. I have not had much of a chance to check it out but it looks useful and I look forward to participating. One thing is new – you can download trial versions of Blaze Advisor. Have fun…

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Repositories, processes, decisions and more

September 29, 2008

Bruce Silver had an interesting article recently on The Next Innovation in BPMS in which he discusses the need for repository capabilities in BPM. Bruce makes the point that “next generation” repositories for process management must not only support process models, they must also support “decision models”, business object definitions, performance measurement information and service [...]

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Franchises, localization and decision management

September 25, 2008

I live in Palo Alto and a new Mountain Mike’s Pizza has just opened up near us. Much as we like MM pizza we have two problems – we like wholewheat dough and, as several members of my family are lactose/milk intolerant, soy cheese. If you have visited or live in Palo Alto you will [...]

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Finding hidden decisions in business processes

September 24, 2008

Scott Sehlhorst (with whom I have presented and about whom I have written before) had a great post this week called Hidden Business Rule Example. Scott walks through some analysis of a process and shows how finding hidden decisions within that process can really inform how you think about the systems and processes you need. [...]

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Collections Best Practices

September 23, 2008

Jeff Bernstein of Strategem Portfolio Services gave an overview of the latest developments in collections. Jeff’s company has a product called Strategy Director (about which I blogged before). Jeff does a lot of work with collections groups and all too often sees a failure to implement analytics even where those analytic models are being developed [...]

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From Scores to Strategies

September 23, 2008

The use of analytics in business decisions, presented by one of InfoCentricity’s customers, was next. In many organizations modelers are busy building predictive models that they then throw over the wall to a business analyst. To bridge this gap you need a collaboration platform that allows modelers to do their thing while allowing business analysts [...]

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Putting Analytics to Work

September 22, 2008

Here’s my presentation from the InfoCentricity User Exchange. Enjoy.
Putting Analytics To Work
View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: predictive analyticsanalyticedmente…)

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Scorecard Development Efficiencies with Xeno

September 22, 2008

Sue Gonella presented on some efficiencies in building predictive scorecards. In particular she covered the   use of sampling data vs using all records into a model development exercise.
Rather than using all records she advocated using stratified random sampling where a sample of each group of interest is used to build and validate the models. [...]

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Marketing and Customer Segmentation with Xeno

September 22, 2008

Delivering the best value proposition using segmentation is a multi-step journey with 6 main steps and some critical differences from other analytic approaches:

Define Segmentation Objectives
The first step – deciding why to build a segmentation scheme – is important but often overlooked. Reasons may include declining financial performance, changes in strategy or market trends – the [...]

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Impact Modeling and Maximizing Marketing Return

September 22, 2008

Nina Shikaloff discussed an analytics technique that I had not heard of – Impact Modeling. Impact Modeling is a decision modeling technique. Decisions on acquiring customers – what to offer for instance – managing customers and handling difficult customers are all important and it can be tricky to identify better ones. Impact modeling is about [...]

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Live from the InfoCentricity User Exchange

September 22, 2008

Today and tomorrow I am attending the 4th annual InfoCentricity User Exchange. I got an overview of their Xeno product some time ago (blogged here) and I am looking forward to learning more about what their customers do with the product. All the attendees have our book too so that should be fun.
First up is [...]

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Segmentation and product design

September 18, 2008

Scott had a great article on segmentation and personas this week that is a nice, quick read. I think the use of analytics in persona design can make a big difference (as I have noted before) and that decision management can use good customer segmentation as a first step towards extreme personalization.
If you are not [...]

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Making decisions about loyalty programs

September 16, 2008

1:1 had a nice piece on the growing role of loyalty programs in retail. This noted the “Growing sophistication in loyalty programs” among retailers and, in particular, the use of loyalty program data not just to calculate lifetime customer value but also to build competitive advantage. This second aspect is the one I always find [...]

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More on standards – Rule Interchange Format

September 16, 2008

Continuing on the theme of standards, several working drafts specifications have been recently published by Rule Interchange Format (RIF) working group of the W3C for public comment:

The specification of RIF basic logic dialect (RIF-BLD) is in its “Last Call” public comment period. This is the time for people to read it and tell us, the [...]

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Chief Decision Officer?

September 15, 2008

Mitch Betts’ blog brought an interesting article to my attention this week – an interview Accenture chief scientist Kishore Swaminathan in which he argues that CIOs need to move up the value chain and become Chief Intelligence Officers. I kinda like this but I would not equate being a Chief Intelligence Officer with data but [...]

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More support for PMML

September 15, 2008

Nice to see support for PMML (Predictive Model Markup Language) continuing to expand with the recent announcement of support from Pentaho. Support for standards like this is important in decision management as a number of products will typically need to be used in combination to build decision management solutions.

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First Look – Erudine Behaviour Engine

September 15, 2008

Erudine is a British company a few years old and has released some new technology in a new process context – the Erudine Behaviour Engine (yes, the British spelling). Like many technologies, Erudine is targeting the business-IT divide, focusing on problems like those of translating requirements into systems, integrating the expertise of lots of people [...]

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White Paper available on decision management in credit

September 15, 2008

I wrote an introduction (and a brilliant one if I do say so myself) for a white paper called “Using Automated Decisioning and Business Rules to Improve Real-time Risk Management” that was produced by the folks at Equifax. You can download it using the link to the US Banker page. Enjoy.

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Nice article on decision services in SOA

September 12, 2008

Eric Roch had a nice post today – SOA Decision Services – in which he references some of our work and our book. He ends with a great quote:
As SOA matures we are finding new ways to architect systems and receiving benefits from SOA in unexpected ways. How often have you seen improvement of operational [...]

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Speaking in Brussels Evening of October 10th

September 12, 2008

Thanks to my friend Jan I will be giving a seminar at SAI – the Belgian ‘Study Center for Information Processing’ – in the evening of October 10th. You can find details here – I am speaking on ‘Decision Services’: A pattern for business rules in Service Oriented Systems and Architectures.

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