Some time ago I got a pre-release copy of Knowledge Automation: How to Implement Decision Management in Business Processes, Alan Fish’s new book on the analysis and design techniques of decision management. I was delighted to write a foreword for Alan and with the arrival of a printed copy I wanted to extend this with a review. Alan’s book lays out the core analysis techniques you need to model and manage decisions. I use these techniques in my decision discovery work with clients and wove them into the approach I describe in chapter 5 of Decision Management Systems.

The book begins with an overview of the knowledge economy, why systems need to embed knowledge and why decisions matter in this context. Having established a clear case for decision management he follows with an excellent discussion of the role of decisions and decision management in process management. Decision Management and Process Management go hand in hand and most business problems will require an effective combination. As Alan says, Decision Management involves more than just identifying operational decisions, you must also

codify the knowledge used to make them, and encapsulate the knowledge in automated decision-making systems

Alan shows that it is essential not to simply replicate what you do today, but to improve it. Using Decision Management to automate and improve decision making changes the processes of which these decisions are a part, making them simpler smarter and more agile. Alan’s focus on decisions as a means to drive process innovation is therefore particularly welcome. His hierarchy of a customer journey supported by a business process and a set of decisions is an effective model, especially when the decisions are implemented in decision services that encapsulate the decision making logic required. This chapter is full of good advice including some great discussion of roles in decision making and his emphasis of organizational issues and constraints is likewise central to effective modeling of decisions.

Chapter 3 gives a nice summary of the available technology and then the book moves into the core techniques of Decision Requirements Analysis and their application in building automated decision-making systems. The first of these focuses on decisions and decision services. As Alan says

Decision Services make decisions

which sounds trivial but is core to his approach and to my focus on Decision Management Systems. The decisions being implemented in Decision Services should be modeled and managed top-down and Alan works his way through an effective set of techniques to do this, covering both modeling and requirements gathering. The 3 kinds of information needed to make a decision – data, knowledge and prior decisions – are well explained and he makes great points about the interactions of processes with decisions and role of rules in defining decision logic and hence knowledge. A succinct and effective description of how to map all this analysis to design and implementation using a business rules management system and related technology follows. He wraps up with some useful decision patterns.

As I said in my foreword

I have been working in Decision Management for most of the last decade, spending much of that helping companies use business rules and predictive analytic technology to automate and improve business decisions. Alan’s approach to gathering, modeling and managing decision requirements immediately struck me as the right way to approach this problem. I have been using it with my clients ever since.

This approach works, which is why I use it, and if you are interested in building Decision Management Systems or doing effective decision-centric analysis before using business rules, then this book should be on your bookshelf.

Tad Anderson just wrote a great review of Decision Management Systems, my new book, over on his blog on the SOA World Magazine site. Two of his comments struck me particularly. The first summarized what I consider to be the biggest limiting factor in information systems today:

There are not too many systems being created today that I would consider more than interfaces to a data structure.

How many systems does your company have that do more than allow the management of data? Once you eliminate their ability to create, find, update and delete data records what else do they do? They probably allow you to report out the data they store (though this might involve using a separate analytical system) and if you are lucky they might tell you when something is due or when you need to take some action. But for most systems, that’s about it. If they are programmed do anything else they probably don’t do it right – it was perhaps right once upon a time but the business has changed, the regulations have changed and customer behavior has changed so it’s not right any more. As a result, as Tad puts it,

The systems themselves are viewed as a necessary evil by the people who use them.

Most users know they have to use the systems so that the company has the data it needs to operate but that’s about it. How many customer service agents REALLY use their CRM system? How many sales people do more with their SFA system than put in the data that will get them their commission? Does your ERP system really manage your supply chain or production facilities or simply record what happened in them? Do users email each other spreadsheets because it is too hard to get the system to do what is necessary or too hard to change the way it works?

The idea behind Decision Management Systems is to use proven technology (business rules management systems, data mining and predictive analytic workbenches, optimization tools) to create applications that are agile (so they can be changed when you need to change them), analytic (so that they use the data you have to make better decisions) and adaptive (so that they learn and adapt over time). These systems become your partners in running your business not just passive repositories of your data.

Tad points out that we have a ton of material over on DecisionManagementSolutions.com – our “awesome web site” as he calls it. Check out the white papers and briefs in particular. Of course I also REALLY like the last line of the review:

Over all if you are in IT, I highly recommend reading this book.

And if you haven’t already bought it, you can do so on IBM Press (35% discount code TAYLOR4389), on amazon.com (book and Kindle version), on Barnes and Noble (book and nook version) and on InformIT, Pearson’s site.

Decision Management can only succeed if the business rules for decisions can be effectively managed. Effective management must involve both business and IT organizations. There must be alignment and collaboration if the business rules are to be managed correctly. Indeed empowering this collaboration is the primary value of a business rules management system. Yet most systems development methodologies are predicated on a separation between the business and IT. These methodologies create artifacts and manage processes to try and minimize this separation but they take it for granted. To successfully adopt business rules and manage decisions an agile systems development approach specifically for business rules is required.

Some months back Jerome Boyer and Hafedh Mili published a great book on Agile Business Rule Development: Process, Architecture, and JRules Examples. ABRD is unique in that it is an agile methodology that promotes iteration and the early use of a business rules management system. Focusing on incremental and iterative development it has been specifically developed to handle new artifacts like business rules, decision points and more. It applies the key tenets of the agile manifesto and takes advantage of the power of business rules management systems to deliver on those tenets. It shows how using a shared business rules definition allows you to value “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”. It prototypes early using these shared rule definitions to ensure “Working software over comprehensive documentation” It leverages the ability of non-technical business people to understand and even edit business rules to deliver “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”. Finally it relies on the faster update and deployment cycles of a business rules management system to ensure projects put “Responding to change over following a plan”.

The Agile Business Rules Development (ABRD) methodology at the heart of the book was donated to the open source community several years ago by ILOG, now part of IBM. I was immediately impressed with both ABRD and the Eclipse Process Framework in which it was presented. I have worked on many decision management system projects that used business rules and business rules management systems and I have a background in methodology. ABRD is a well thought out methodology, embodying many best practices for business rules-based development that could help organizations build Decision Management Systems and adopt business rules management systems.

Some companies make the mistake of assuming that decision management and business rules can be adopted by an IT department without changing existing governance and development approaches. Others assume that they can handle business rules as part of modeling and managing business processes. In fact, new approaches and techniques are required. An agile approach combined with the use of business rules management systems for managing the logic in decision-making components has allowed the companies I work with to empower business users and analysts to collaborate effectively with their IT teams and even to control some of the logic themselves. Effective management of the decision logic has improved decision accuracy, compliance and consistency.

Companies that adopt a business rules management system and use it to manage decisions are more agile, better aligned and have systems and processes that are just plain smarter. ABRD has many important characteristics for such an organization: It treats business rules, and decisions, as separate artifacts; It links these artifacts to your business motivation and shows how they can be packaged up to deliver decision services, coherent decision-making components in a Service-Oriented Architecture; And it focuses on using this technology to get a core component up and running quickly so that it can be involved and continuously improved as you learn and as your business changes.

With this book, Jerome and Hafedh have written more than just a complete guide to ABRD. This book provides an introduction to business rules and to the ABRD methodology. It discusses key ABRD topics like rule harvesting (from elicitation to analysis) and rule prototyping and design. It outlines key design patterns and covers critical issues in everything from rule authoring to deployment and testing. Rule performance, rule governance and detailed descriptions of how to do all this with IBM’s business rules management system round out a thorough and complete book.

If you plan to use business rules to extend and manage the decisions in your operational environment, something I highly recommend, this book will show you how to use an agile approach to do so. You can buy it here.

Nancy Pearson and David Farrell kicked off the main event. 8,000 people at IBM IMPACT apparently and Nancy introduced the key themes – helping companies optimize for growth and focus on delivering results. The topics are based on a continued focus on getting business and IT to work together (a key theme of Decision Management of course), a growing industry focus and introducing new and emerging business and technology models. IBM IMPACT, Nancy says, is about how to transform your company for growth. This involves

• Business agility
• Operational dexterity
• Process integrity

All drivers for Decision Management.

After a great “100 years of IBM in 100 seconds” video, John Iwata came on to talk about the centennial. Starting with punch cards, talking about innovations like 80 column punch cards, moving to magnetic tape and then the introduction of System 360 mainframe which, as he said, completely cannibalized all existing IBM products! But as with many innovations, customers did not know what to do with it and IBM had to work on ideas like Online Transaction Processing systems. And this pattern has repeated – technology innovation needing business innovation to take advantage of it. This path ends, at least for now, with the Smarter Planet initiatives of recent years.

The challenge is that people must believe they can change and act on what they see. They start with instrumenting to manage, integrate to innovate and then optimize to transform. This is interesting as it shows why BI and performance management are where people start, then they start hooking together various systems before applying analytics, business rules and decision management (for instance) to transform their business.

Children’s Hospital Boston came up next. The chief of critical medical care came on to talk about the importance of information and better access to it in improving healthcare. He started with a story of a girl his team saved but he wanted to talk not about the success, but about the fact that what they learned about curing her is locked up and hard to share or act on. Talking to other doctors with a video link works but it is a little low tech… and it does not help the rest of the kids, the ones who don’t have a video link to those who know. And right now the way medical knowledge is transferred to doctors is the same is it was 100 years ago – lectures, rounds, random knowledge acquisition based on attendance. Time for a smarter approach.

Changes are coming, with a focus on simulation for example, as well as a variety of different approaches to make sure that different adult learning styles are addressed with videos, simulation, lectures, notes. This works but it does not scale well – how to get this transferred to people all over the world. Inspired by watching his teenage son play a video game as a team with kids all over the world and by an IBM powered site for the Masters Golf tournament that combined videos, expert commentary and simulations, he went to IBM.

IBM built what they called a PICU without walls. This works offline and online and contains videos, advice, protocols, simulators and calculators for child care. It uses the cloud to update itself but does not require an internet connection. It creates a “social network” between the users of it so they can share. It teaches how to handle key childhood diseases. And it is not one-way, it is a many to many network that allows those with expertise anywhere to teach everyone else.

Change and uncertainty were the next topic. CIOs and CEOs see lots of change and uncertainty but don’t know what is going to drive this change and don’t feel comfortable that they will be able to change to respond. Business agility, and business agility across your extended enterprise, is essential to succeed and survive in the future. Transformation to deal with this and to respond to it is no longer optional.

IBM’s WebSphere is a big stack these days. At the bottom is the application infrastructure. Using SOA as a core approach and adding connectivity and integration to SOA brings more integrated systems. These systems can be coordinated and managed using Business Process Management and Decision Management technologies.

This stack supports the new business strategies required by business agility and uncertainty. This transformation requires new growth with faster time to value while reducing cost. Do more with less. So, can you change your processes quickly and effectively to handle uncertainty and change? And I would add, can you change the decisions in your processes so that you can keep your processes stable while still responding to change? IBM has launched a new Business Process Manager product that combines technology from Process Server, ILOG, Lombardi et al by the sounds of things. More on this tomorrow I guess.

Next up Caterpillar who like to say that all over the world there is dirt or a commodity that is in the wrong place – creating an opportunity to move it to where it should be! Caterpillar has been around since 1925 and has faced several critical strategic breakpoints – World War II when they kept focused on earth moving equipment or 1980s when they spent $2B on modernizing factories. Now they are a $42B company with 225,000 employees in 50 countries? For the last 83 years IBM has been a partner of Caterpillar where IBM focuses on Caterpillar’s digital infrastructure. With tools like ILOG’s business rules management system and SPSS’ analytic platform, Caterpillar can manage its business and its ongoing transformation. And their CEO describes this as involving two problems – cannot move fast enough and cannot make enough money!

Warranty Management for instance is a critical problem and have used ILOG and SPSS to build a warranty claim decision management application that saves over $60M plus (check out this white paper on smarter warranty chain management using rules and analytics). “Smart” trucks are also part of the solution – the huge off-road trucks carry vast amounts of material but they also carry a lot of electronics and “smarts” because people just want a ton of material moved, they don’t want to pay for the $5M truck. Smart monitoring and diagnostics are critical to keeping these trucks operating and working effectively.

More to come.

My friend Carsten Ziegler, with Thomas Albrecht, has just released a new book on business rules for SAP customers – BRFplus — Business Rule Management for ABAP Applications. I was delighted to provide a foreword to this book as I think BRFplus is a terrific tool for SAP customers, giving them the power of business rules on their ABAP infrastructure. You can buy the book right now on SAP Press and amazon.com.

I first met Carsten at SAP TechEd in 2009 as he presented BRFplus. I was impressed then by the capability of both Carsten and his product. I have spent the last 8 years promoting business rules and helping companies use business rules technology, like BRFplus, to automate and improve business decisions as Neil Raden and I described in Smart Enough Systems.

SAP is adopting business rules and BRFplus in its applications – showing how mainstream the approach has become in recent years. BRFplus is unique because it is a business rules management system specifically designed to work as a part of an SAP enterprise backbone. But BRFplus is a not a lightweight product – it is a complete business rules management system that allows you to create, manage and deploy simple and complex rules in an ABAP environment – so a book on how it works is timely and welcome.

The book contains a succinct but thorough definition of business rules and business rules management systems followed by a walk-through of the whole product and a quick tutorial to help you build your first BRFplus application. Anyone considering using BRFplus at any level will find these chapters helpful in getting familiar with the product. Two more technical chapters discuss how BRFplus handles objects, especially the objects being manipulated in SAP applications, and the core elements of BRFplus (rulesets, expressions, functions and actions). These more reference-oriented chapters will be useful as you develop more complex solutions with BRFplus as will those that cover the administration tools and performance/integration considerations. The book concludes with a set of deployment patterns and a high-level outline of a suitable methodology for developing rules-based systems.

Carsten and Thomas have written a detailed yet readable description of BRFplus. The book covers everything from the web-based user interface for non-technical users to the technical details of the integration APIs. If you plan to use business rules to extend and manage your SAP Business Suite applications, which I highly recommend, this book will show you how to do so.

If you just want something short to be getting on with, check out this white paper I wrote on business rules and SAP – Business rules and decisioning for process experts. Got questions? Want some help getting started with business rules – drop me a line anytime james@decisionmanagementsolutions.com

I am a big believer in the power of standards to drive market expansion when they are done right and one of my favorite standards recently has been PMML – the Predictive Model Markup Language. This XML standard allows analytic models to be developed on one of  a wide range of analytic modeling workbenches and then deployed to databases and data warehouses, to business rules management systems and to a variety of decisioning and process management platforms. Given how important analytics are to decision management and how strongly I believe that pushing analytics into operational systems maximizes the value of analytics, PMML matters.

Now my friends at Zementis have collaborated on a new book on PMML – PMML in Action: Unleashing the Power of Open Standards for Data Mining and Predictive Analytics. They asked me to write the foreword for the book and I was happy to given the importance of the material and the lack of a publication on this topic. The book is available from amazon.com now and if PMML is of interest to you, and it should be, why not check it out.

I received a pre-release copy of Tom Davenport’s new book Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results. The book is a follow-on to Competing on Analytics (reviewed here) and is a shorter, pithier book than its predecessor. Once again Tom collaborates with Jeanne Harris and this time Robert Morison of the Concours group. Where the previous book focused on so-called analytic competitors, this is about “analytics for the rest of us”. It is a very readable book with some good practical advice that does not require the remaking of your company in a new image. It is also a quick read, it is only 180 pages or so, which should help get more people to read it.

And I hope people do read it. As Tom says “The unexamined decision isn’t worth making” and too many companies and organizations are making unexamined decisions, failing to apply data they have about what works and what does not, making the same mistakes over and making dumb decisions. Like Tom I think it is time for this to stop and this book will tell you how.

In the initial chapter, the book outlines the difference between areas with a history of analytic decision making and those where it is new – performance metrics may be progress in the latter but something like customer segmentation and treatment requires more advanced analytics to score and segment them. It’s important to remember this, to find the right degree of analytic sophistication to make a difference. The book’s focus is broad, covering how analytics can address key questions of information and insight in each of the past, present, future – reporting, alerts and forecasting give information in the past, present and future while modeling, recommendations and predictions/optimization do the same for insight.

For me the most useful part of the book is part one – a set of chapters describing The Analytic DELTA – Data, Enterprise, Leadership, Targets and Analysts – what Tom regards as the 5 critical elements of successful analytic adoption:

• D – accessible, high quality data
  I particularly like the focus on uniqueness as a criteria and on using the business need (decision) to drive quality and integration needs – being with the decision in mind. Focusing BI/analytics people on the quality of decisions they enable not on the data they manage like Humana’s “advocate of all matters quantitative” who relentlessly improves “corporate decision making efforts”.
• E – enterprise orientation
  The point here is not to focus on fractured analytic projects but on coherent ones across the enterprise. Enterprise-serving projects not self-serving ones. The authors make the great point that getting value from your enterprise applications means anticipating how to use the information they provide to improve performance.
• L – analytical leadership
  An organization’s leaders must care about analytical decision making, especially where it is multiplicative and delivers leverage (in highly repeatable operational decisions, for instance, where the improvement in decisions is multiplied across all your transactions).
• T – strategic targets
  A crucial element, that of focusing on using analytics to develop distinctive capabilities. This chapter has a great list of processes that lend themselves to analytics because they are data rich, asset or labor intensive, dependent on speed or consistency and more. The focus on decisions that are complex or ca be optimized, where consistency is required and those done poorly today is spot on. The “ladder of analytic applications” is a great tool for seeing how to develop from simple to more complex analytic solutions working from getting your data in order to segmentation and differentiation, becoming predictive, institutionalizing and finally optimizing. Interestingly this sequence matches exactly the pattern I have seen in research I have been doing for IBM on analytic journeys.
• A – analysts
  A nice chapter with good thoughts on how to manage analysts as a strategic resource.

Part two addresses how to stay analytical through embedding analytics in business processes, building an analytic culture, reviewing your business comprehensively and embarking on an analytical journey towards “more analytical decisions and better results”. I really like the focus on embedding analytics in business processes – this is a topic close to my heart – and like the authors agree that the use of analytics is especially valuable in workhorse or operational processes. The authors do a nice job of explaining why organizations need to adopt a test and learn mindset, to be always unsatisfied and mindful of change and to focus on an “industrial” analytic process.

While Tom and I disagree over the extent to which analytics can be used to drive fully or mostly automated decisions, we are in synch on his definition of nirvana – an organization that knows its decision points, relies on analytics, integrates them into its operations and monitors performance to close the loop. And one that MAKES DECISIONS AND TAKES ACTIONS using analytics – one that realizes it is not enough to just analyze its data.

The authors end by pointing out that becoming analytic is not a one-time activity but must be ongoing – it is a journey which organizations must begin, where they must build momentum and where they must go from thinking of analytics to thinking about decisions and decision making, from analytic management to decision management.

It’s a great book and you should buy it.

Principles of the Business Rule Approach by Ron Ross

This book is one of the classics on business rules from one of the most long-standing authors in the area, Ron Ross. The book is a little more than three years old but, as it is not really focused on technology for managing business rules so much as the general approach, it has aged well.

Ron does a good job explaining what business rules and how to capture them and gives a solid overview of things like fact models, processes and how they relate to rules, and dos and don’ts of rule writing. There is a lot in the book about his particular approach to writing rules which, whether you follow it or not, has some good advice about usage and style for writing declarative business rules.

The book does not go into details on the technology of implementing business rules using a business rules management system but instead focuses on the value of an approach that separates business rules from other kinds of requirements and manages those rules as an asset. A good book to introduce the subject to someone without a technology bent.

Business Rules Applied: Building Better Systems Using the Business Rules Approach by Barbara von Halle

This book is one of the classics on developing information systems with a business rules approach. Not only does the book give a good overview of the key concepts in business rules, it also lays out the core tasks and techniques for an actual methodology to develop rules-based systems. Barbara brings great experience in database design and other core application development techniques and she weaves the unique tasks and issues of a business rules approach right in. Anyone used to a “traditional” application development approach will find plenty of reference points so they don’t get lost and yet all the keys they need to succeed with a need approach based on business rules.

The references to business rules management systems are a little out of date as you would expect given the book is a few years old but the core advice remains as good today as it was then. Although Barb continues to develop her ideas and write on business rules, this book is an excellent reference for anyone planning business rules projects, conducting them or interested in how to start using them. Highly recommended.

Business Rules Management and Service-Oriented Architecture by Ian Graeme

This is a fairly technical look at business rules, the technology of a business rules management system and patterns of using them. The book gives a fairly quick overview of SOA and then introduces business rules, both as an approach and as a class of technology. He covers different execution styles, the features of a Business Rules Management System and compares three products (Blaze Advisor, JRules and Haley). For JRules and Blaze Advisor at least he is out of date in the details but you still get a feel for the products and his method for evaluating tools is a useful read for anyone who likes to compare rules products with the traditional list of features.

Ian builds on many of the basic methodology steps outlined in previous rules books (like Barbara von Halle’s) and then adds a really interesting section (about a third of the book) or patterns for requirements, elicitation, development, writing and organizing business rules. While some are fairly straightforward it is still a nice set and an interesting approach very suited to a more flexible methodology (like agile or similar).