October 2008

Optimizing Customer Lifecycle Management

October 30, 2008

David Griffith from CUNA Mutual Group talked about predictive analytics in a B2B environment. CUNA targets credit unions and cooperatives and their members with software and insurance products. CUNA Mutual needed to acquire new credit union accounts for direct insurance products – credit unions who sign up can offer a full range of insurance products [...]

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New Approaches to Creating, Simplifying and Visualizing Rules

October 30, 2008

Stuart Crawford from Fair Isaac’s R&D group presented on New Approaches to Creating, Simplifying and Visualizing Rules. While decision trees can be very clear, they can also become very complex. His group has been working on algorithms for simplifying decision trees. Because decision trees often have repeating sub-trees – pieces of the tree that are [...]

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Integrating Predictive Analytics and BRM to Improve Health Plan Member Experience

October 30, 2008

Two gentlemen from Deloitte presented Integrating Predictive Analytics and BRM to Improve Health Plan Member Experience. 80% of healthcare costs are incurred by 20% of members and traditionally the 20% get all the focus. Analytics and data mining get applied to claims, authorization, costs as a result. Segmentation focuses on the unprofitable and unhealthy. Increasingly [...]

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Building Blocks of Decision Management

October 30, 2008

Michele Edelman of Discover presented on Building Blocks of Decision Management: “Tools to Rule”. Michele spends a lot of time educating people inside Discover and her team use sources like McKinsey to show executives why EDM matters. For instance, a report on top 10 macro-economic trends:

Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly not just globally [...]

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EDM Summit – Day 3 Begins

October 30, 2008

Day 3 starts early – 8am for the first session. The Expo closed yesterday and today will be just content. Yesterday was an interesting day with lots of discussion among the attendees of the Oracle acquisition of Haley. Here are the blog posts I found for yesterday

2008 Business Rules Forum – Day 1
2008 Business [...]

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Oracle buys Haley

October 29, 2008

Well after SAP bought YASU and IBM bought ILOG everyone figured Oracle had to move and they did today, buying Haley. Interestingly the announcement seemed focused more on software for government agencies than on rules as part of Oracle’s platform so perhaps there is more to come regarding rules in Fusion.
Interesting times.

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Predictive Analytics Produces Business Rules That Deliver

October 29, 2008

Eric Siegel, who is chairing the new Predictive Analytics World show, presented on predictive analytics and business rules. Predictive analytics, says Eric, is a business intelligence technology that products a predictive score for each customer or prospect … and explanations thereof. These scores come from predictive models that are developed across your historical data. This [...]

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Rules in tables, spreadsheets and diagrams

October 29, 2008

Jan presented on Rules in tables, spreadsheets and diagrams: Towards High Definition Communication. Decision tables are ways to represent sets of rules and there are many ways to represent sets of rules including trees and graphs. Some ways of representing rules are clearer than others and some are better for validation of the rules. You [...]

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EDM Summit – Day 2 Begins

October 29, 2008

Getting ready for my keynote and wanted to post a few quick things. Firstly other bloggers: Sandy Kemsley, Paul Vincent and Mike Kaviz are all here and are/will be posting. Here are the links I found so far:

Business Rules Forum: Vendor Panel
Business Rules Forum: Mixing Rules and Process
Business Rules Forum: Ron Ross keynote
Business Intelligence meets [...]

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Rules and Process Management for Insurers

October 28, 2008

Chubb has been working with Blaze Advisor to automate a number of decisions. They began with specialty lines underwriting (automated renewals), claims severity calculation and work queue assignment. Current focus is on integrating predictive models and some legacy modernization.
The automated renewals project reduced the time to make renewal rule changes from 3-6 months of IT [...]

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Risk Management at Sun

October 28, 2008

Risk management is necessary at Sun as new products are constantly being introduced. Each time there are challenges getting information out to people. Also find the same problem repeatedly in different geographies and were challenged to share information about problems and solutions between teams. By 2001 they found over 300 user developed applications supporting risk [...]

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Hotwire.com Revenue Management

October 28, 2008

Darren Koch presented on Hotwire.com’s use of ILOG business rules in revenue management. Summary:

Ongoing segmentation and optimization help businesses serve customers
Smart testing + flexibility = better service = higher profits
Continues to show ROI that is increasing over time

Hotwire.com was founded in 1999 to help travel partners (who invested) sell excess inventory without driving down prices [...]

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Live from the EDM Summit – From Here to Agility

October 28, 2008

I am at the EDM Summit this week and will be blogging live from some of the sessions and posting random thoughts and comments in addition. Despite the difficult market conditions, attendance looks good with a nice full room for the keynote and attendees from 17 countries. This year’s event also has a dozen new [...]

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Going to the EDM Summit/Business Rules Forum

October 24, 2008

Next week Neil and I will be at the EDM Summit/Business Rules Forum the whole week so say hi if you are there and look for posts from the show.

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Not just web personalization, extreme personalization

October 24, 2008

Tim Walters of Forrester had an interesting post this week – Is Web Personalization Now A Matter Of “Thurvival”? in which he emphasized that, even in a downturn, getting better at web personalization has a payoff. Now I think personalization is a good thing and the evidence that it results in more engagement, better results [...]

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Evidence-based (decision-centric) CRM Processes

October 22, 2008

Graham Hill wrote a piece on Evidence-based CRM that focused on evidence-based CRM programs and it made me think about evidence-based CRM processes.
To me, evidence-based CRM means customer relationships, and thus customer treatments, that are based on evidence (data) and not judgment, hope, guesswork etc. It means

making offers that you have evidence this customer will [...]

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How many different kinds of decision management are there?

October 21, 2008

Well at least one more as of today – Jim Sinur, over on his Gartner blog – has finally started to use the phrase he has been threatening to use for a while “Intelligent Decision Management”. While Jim has not published a formal definition – I expect he will soon now he is back at [...]

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Events, Decisions and “Real-Time Intelligence”

October 20, 2008

I am one of the featured speakers in the forthcoming Tibco series on Using Events to Add Real-Time Intelligence. It’s an online event with webinars, “booths”, and real Tibco people available to answer questions. You can register for it here.

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Dumb government systems

October 20, 2008

I recently past 10 years as a US citizen and, as a result, was returning from Europe with a new passport. To celebrate this occaision the INS decided to put me through a manual check – apparently my name matched someone on the watch list. Now it should be noted that nothing else did – [...]

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Are your live agents helping or hurting you with customers?

October 17, 2008

Randy Saunders had a great post over on the Perfect Customer Experience -Can I please speak with a live agent? In it he has a great quote:
Forester’s study finds that 45 percent of consumers prefer to speak with a customer service agent to answer questions and resolve service issues, yet most walk away from customer [...]

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