2008

First Look – Intalio Business Edition

December 9, 2008

I got an update from Ishmael Ghalimi at Intalio this week. I have blogged about Intalio a few times, including a set of posts from their user group – check out the intalio tag. Intalio is a company built on a variant of the open source model with 80% of their code in open source, [...]

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SOA is necessary for agility but not sufficient

December 8, 2008

Fred Cummins had a post on the topic of measuring agility in which he gives two ways to assess how well SOA supports agility.
When a business change is considered

how many services must change to accommodate the new business requirements
for services that change, how significant are the changes

It is this second point that interests me. When [...]

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Business Rules, Decisions and Processes

December 5, 2008

Mike Kavtiz wrote a nice post on Agile SOA: Empower the Business with Business Rules Engines. One of the things his post shows, however, is that business process notations don’t do a good job with decisions. Mike has to annotate his diagram to show where he used rules. He could have considered one or more [...]

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Business Event Management and Decisions

December 4, 2008

There has been another flurry of posts around event processing and event management recently. IBM recently announced Business Event Management about which the architect guy had this feedback, Carole-Ann posted An attempt at demystifying CEP, BPM and BRMS and Eric Roch replied with EDA, CEP, BPM, BRMS and SOA. This is also a topic on [...]

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First Look Blaze Advisor 6.6

December 4, 2008

Blaze Advisor 6.6 is an incremental release to Fair Isaac’s business rules management system that has just become available. As Fair Isaac has used the product more extensively as the basis for its decisioning applications its own experience has driven a variety of useful features and this, combined with the Blaze Advisor team’s usual focus [...]

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Fraud Detection with Oracle Data Mining

December 3, 2008

Charlie Berger and some others presented on using data mining for fraud detection. Fraud is a huge issue – for instance there is $31B annually in insurance claims fraud (10-15%) with 25% of all claims have some fraud and more than 1 in 3 bodily-injury claims from car crashes involving fraud. Other industries have similar [...]

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Intelligent OLAP: Data Mining and OLAP

December 3, 2008

Marty Gubar presented on Deliver Depper Insight by Combining Data Mining and OLAP. Marty presented on Oracle’s analytic spectrum and how OLAP and Data Mining fit and can be combined. OLAP and data mining are embedded in the Oracle database and share security, the partitioning, ETL etc. All can be accessed using PL/SQL so cubes [...]

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Getting to the Right Price with Oracle Data Mining

December 2, 2008

Rachel Scales presented on Getting to the Right Price: Using BI Apps with Oracle Data Mining to Improve You Company’s Margins. Pricing is increasingly complex as the world is changing and becoming more competitive. Customer loyalties are changing, resources are constrained and competition is more global. Price management is necessary to ensure your share of [...]

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From Data Warehousing to Strategic Data Assets

December 2, 2008

Usama Fayyad, previously Chief Data Officer of Yahoo, presented a keynote on From Data Warehousing to Strategic Data Assets – Case Studies on the Web: Social Networking, Direct-Response Marketing and Understanding Customer Behavior.
The number of users on the web continues to grow rapidly, approaching 1Bn. The data created as these users move around the web [...]

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Critical Success Factors for successful BI and analytic implementations

December 2, 2008

A panel of the keynote presenters discussed critical success factors for BI and analytics. Panels are tricky to blog so this is just going to be a list of thoughts generated by the panelists with no attempt to assign them to the individuals. Critical success factors, then, include:

You must understand what drives high performance for [...]

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Powering Next-Generation Predictive Applications with Oracle Data Mining (ODM)

December 2, 2008

Charlie Berger of Oracle presented on Powering Next-Generation Predictive Applications with Oracle Data Mining (ODM). Charlie joined Oracle from Thinking Machines about a decade ago and have been putting machine learning algorithms into the Oracle kernel. Data Mining, in database or otherwise, sifts through data to find hidden patterns, discover new insights and make predictions. [...]

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Live from BIWA Summit – Competing on Analytics

December 2, 2008

At the Business Intelligence Warehousing and Analytics Summit at Oracle today. BIWA is part of the Oracle User Group focused on BI, analytics and data warehousing. Jeanne Harris of Accenture (author, with Tom Davenport, of Competing on Analytics) started off the day. The subtitle of her presentation is “Building Competitive Strategies Around Data-driven Insights”.
Analytics are [...]

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Decision Management, Tom Davenport and the New BI

December 2, 2008

Tom wrote an interesting post this week on 10 Principles of the New Business Intelligence and made a couple of really good points:
1. Decisions are the unit of work to which BI initiatives should be applied.
2. Providing access to data and tools isn’t enough if you want to ensure that decisions are actually improved.
I like [...]

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New blog location

November 29, 2008

Well as you might have noticed I have a new blog location – jtonedm.com (JT on EDM). The blog on smartenoughsystems.com/wp is now retired and all the posts will redirect here.
If you have a link to the smartenoughsystems blog please move it – just replace smartenoughsystems.com/wp with jtonedm.com (note the dropping of the /wp).

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More analytics in the cloud

November 25, 2008

Having posted about Zementis – a company that allows you to deploy analytic models into the amazon coud – before I now see that Mathematica is getting in on this whole cloud thing. Personally I think that analytics and decisioning are ideal for operating in the cloud. Analytics take a lot of computing power when [...]

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1:1 Marketing works for the NHL

November 25, 2008

Interesting article on how the NHL used the power of personalization and targeting (or extreme personalization) to improve results. It does not talk about how they do this but clearly they have made things like the front cover choice for their catalog and key elements of their web presence decisions so they can make [...]

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Results of a survey on verification of business rules

November 24, 2008

Some time ago I linked to an interesting looking research project and the results are now available – Development and Verification of Rule Based Systems – a Survey of Developers. Valentin did a nice job summarizing the results, comparing them to a previous study of more academic projects and drawing some distinctions between academic and [...]

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The small impact of business rules on the big players

November 21, 2008

Jim Sinur brought up an interesting point today when he blogged IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP have bought Business Rule Technology. What’s up with that? The big players seem to be toying with business rules – there’s plenty of activity but not much understanding or commitment.

SAP bought Yasu but until recently did not show much [...]

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In the coming recession put your customers first with decision management

November 20, 2008

I was pointed to a post today on the topic of customer service (Another Day, Another Customer-Service Nightmare on the EconoWhiner) that pointed out that companies
need to provide quality service and quality customer service if they’re going to survive an economic downturn as severe as this one?
Now I am not going to pick on AOL [...]

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