The Forbes Mini Main Tent was kicked off by Mike Perlis, CEO of Forbes. Mike focused on how to build a business as strong as the Forbes brand – something with four legs:

• Keep print business on track
• Build the digital business for growth
• Develop brand extensions like conferences and international
• Become a great technology company

This last one is critical as the world moves on and supports all the other goals. More than being a great media company, must also be a great technology company. Forbes has been working on this a long time, with one of the first media sites back in 1998 and has continued with early support for e-commerce, dynamic content and social media to reach the current self-publishing platform supporting 1000s of contributors. From 1917 to 2000 Forbes BOUGHT technology but since then they have been technology OWNERS. They still need a strong authoritative journalism base but integrating this with social media and a strong technology platform is critical. And this technology platform continues to evolve and must be kept current.

Mike Rhodin followed to discuss this general theme of transformation. He emphasized the need for deeper insight to improve business outcomes and more intelligent systems. With more data in more formats and a faster pace of change in this data, technology and business must keep pace. Meanwhile non-technology executives are increasingly buying solutions, exceeding in their IT spend the budgets of many CIOs. They care about solutions and about improving their business results. They see this data and are re-thinking how to use this data. They are increasingly closing the loop, applying insight from analytics back into their day to day operations. And applying analytics to both big, strategic decisions and to smaller, day to day operational decisions. Putting analytics to work in real-time decision making at the front line so that every decision is made using the best intelligence possible. Instrumenting every part of the supply chain and customer interaction to provide data that can be used to improve all these decisions. To do this, organizations need Insight from Analytics, decisions managed using Decision Management and processes managed using BPM. Operational intelligence put to work to transform operations.

Gagan Saxena, CIO of Apple Vacations and a client of Decision Management Solutions, came up next. Rather than beginning with technology and seeing how it can help an organization, a new approach is needed. Apple Vacations has historically worked with travel agents to help millions of consumers go on vacation in the Caribbean, Mexico and Hawaii. As consumers got comfortable with the web, Apple Vacations supported more e-commerce. But they found that there was a limit of perhaps 5-10% in online purchases for traditional vacations – people struggle to make the decisions involved to pick a good vacation, struggle to fill out all the forms involved to gather data, can’t organize the data they collect. In the end the complexity of the decision drives almost all of them back to talk to a travel agent. To keep more consumers online, the environment needs to make decisions for consumers. It needs to be a smart system to help consumers but defining what this means is complex – how can all the technology available be applied to produce a smarter system? How do you redesign your organization, your processes to take advantage of all this?

What Gagan and Apple Vacations found was that they needed to focus explicitly on DECISIONS as well as processes, on the use of technology to automate and improve the decisions that drive the business. Begin with the decisions then redesign the processes to take advantage of the ability to automate these decisions. Discovering these decisions (working with Decision Management Solutions and running some decision discovery workshops) makes it clear how to link business strategy to day to day operations. Focusing on these decisions makes it clear where to apply what technology and focuses on the consumer. Apple Vacations experts can inject their expertise to drive the behavior of these decisions. Further, analysis of the results of these decisions can create continuous improvement and drive better decisions. The new website will improve the experience of those shopping for vacations by providing Apple Vacations expertise not just through agents, but through decisions embedded in the operational processes and environments consumers use.

Randall Overby from Bank of NY Mellon came up to share his love of business process management. BNY Mellon Randall always gets the same questions about BPM – how do you make BPM work and how do you get the success you want. He advises teams to:

• Start with the process and with managing it not with the BPMS technology.
• Remember that cultural change is going to be part of most BPM programs
• Stretch “end to end” to include your clients at both ends
• Pick the right tools for your organization, do proof of concepts and pilots as necessary and remember that “tools” include methodologies and approaches not just software
• Include everyone as BPM programs cannot survive in isolation – clients, IT, operations and more.

For BNY Mellon BPM is a holistic management approach that aligns their activities to the needs and wants of their clients. Efficiency, effectiveness, collaboration. For this to work the organization AND the employees need to get something out of BPM projects – it cannot just be about the organization’s efficiency. BPM changes the way the organization works and thinks and BNY Mellon used it to focus on results from a client perspective – focusing on improving results from a client perspective, mutually beneficial changes. In particular they asked those working in the process for ideas and implemented hundreds of them for a 40% permanent reduction in expense while improving client scorecards and reducing staff churn to 2%. The BPM program was a vehicle for becoming partners with their clients, for continuous improvement, agility and empowered individuals.

I have been going to IBM IMPACT for a couple of years now. This year’s event is just around the corner – it starts on Sunday – and I am particularly excited about this one. While it’s not the first at which I have spoken, nor the first where there have been sessions on Decision Management, it does feel like the first where Decision Management will play a real role.

For instance, the Forbes Mini Main Tent will feature a Decision Management Solutions client talking about Decision Management as a strategic tool and he and I will then co-present on From business rules to decision-centric organization. On Tuesday I will be discussing Decision Management Trends with a great customer panel and then signing Decision Management Systems at the bookstore right after. Plus there are a ton of customer case studies and other sessions focused on Decision Management. In between I hope to hear some about IBM’s vision for Decision Management (among other things), catch up with the latest product demos and meet a bunch of folks working in the space. If you are planning to come, please drop by one of the sessions and say hi – I always like to meet blog readers.

Looking forward to IMPACT as I was, it was cool to be named an IBM Champion for Websphere.  I’d like to thank Jean Pommier and Ale Campioli  for nominating me – much appreciated! IBM says that they award the status to people who make a contribution to the broader community by blogging about their specialist subject (as I have been doing for years here at JTonEDM and previously elsewhere), by writing books (like Smart (Enough) Systems, the first book on Decision Management that Neil Raden and I wrote back in 2007 or Decision Management Systems, my new book), contributing thought leadership articles and white papers (see our library on decisionmanagementsolutions.com or check out the Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies report) and so on.

Being an IBM Champion is not a paid position but I certainly appreciate it as a nice way for IBM to recognize those who evangelize a topic and try to move the discussion forward.

The folks at IBM Press have asked me to sign copies of “Decision Management Systems: A Practical Guide to Business Rules and Predictive Analytics” at IBM’s IMPACT event this year. I will be at the bookstore from noon to 1pm on May 1. Bring a copy by to have it signed or buy one at the bookstore – or just come by to say hi. It’s right after my session on Decision Management Trends.

Register for IMPACT here.

Jim Harris of the OCDQ Blog (Obsessive-Compulsive Data Quality) interviewed me for his OCDQ radio show recently and the podcast is now live – check it out on his blog. In the interview Jim and I discuss the whys and wherefores of Decision Management, the four principles of Decision Management Systems and the three legged stool among other things.

And you can win a copy of the book simply by entering Jim’s competition –  just Email Jim Harris by February 29, 2012 and tell him at least one of the four principles of decision management systems that I discussed. Enjoy!

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.

I am participating in an interactive chat on AllAnalytics on Wednesday November 9th at 11:30 am Pacific/2:30pm Eastern. Beth Schultz and I are going to chat about Decision Management Systems (both the book and the systems themselves), the role of analytics (especially predictive analytics) and more. Why not join us?

Go to allanalytics.com/messages.asp?piddl_msgthreadid=243067 to participate (don’t forget to register).

I had no slides for my session but I thought I would post my notes or outline:

I have just written a new book called Decision Management Systems about a class of system not widely deployed in organizations. They’re not new systems – I have been talking about them and helping people build them for the better part of a decade and the reality is that they have been around significantly longer even if the category itself was not well established as an umbrella. Recently the pace of adoption, the pace of change, in decision management has really picked up. And it’s done so because the business world is changing in 3 ways

• Changing Expectations
  • Real-time responsiveness is expected
  • Global customers expect global service
  • Self-service expectations have risen as we enter the 24/7 world
  • Changing Interactions
    • More mobile interactions
    • Increasingly social interactions
    • Changing organizational structures with outsourcing and partner networks
    • And, of course, Changing Scale
      • Big Data
      • More pressure on efficiency
      • Increasing transaction Volumes

These changing expectations, interaction styles and scale mean that companies have to change the kind of systems they build.

• From built to last to built to change – Agile
  So they can handle changing circumstances, deliver agile compliance and support ongoing process improvement
• From seeing data as something to be processed to seeing it as something to be used – Analytic
  Used to manage risk, reduce fraud, target and retain customers and focus resources
• From passive and repetitive to learning and Adaptive
  They must help find new approaches, support test and learn and manage increasingly complex trade-offs

In each case these new systems are built around an operational decision. What are operational decisions? Decisions involve making choices or selections from a range of possible actions. They are action-focused – not just learning but doing. And operational decisions are focused on a single customer a single transaction a single loan a single claim a single marketing interaction. These matter because

• They implement business strategy
• They manage risk
• They are where customer centricity happens
• They are where operational and analytic systems come together

The most powerful stories of Business Rules Management Systems are all about automating these decisions. Focusing on operational decisions makes it easier for business and IT to collaborate – decisions become a shared object that avoids the “big bucket o rules” problem where business or IT creates long lists of rules without context. A focus on decisions also addresses the problem that business rules get everywhere – UI, process, MDM etc. A clear focus on decisions makes it obvious which rules should be managed in a business rules management system and which ones need not be.

And business rules management systems are critical to these kinds of systems. They offer the design transparency needed for agility as well as allowing for business ownership for BUSINESS agility. Their support for execution transparency supports test and learn as well as impact analysis. They provide a platform for collaboration across the three legged stool of business, IT and analytics and they represent a great deployment approach for analytics.

When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. It is easy to see everything as a process. Some processes are not really processes at all but simply decisions. Other processes are very complex because they include decisions and would be much simpler if the decision was managed separately. Sometimes there are fewer processes than you think because the differences between processes are all about decision-making. And sometimes it is the need for a decision that eliminates the local exceptions to your global process. There’s more on this in my white paper Decisions at the Heart of Your Process.

Bottom line? It’s time to build Decision Management Systems that are Agile, Analytic and Adaptive. To do so apply the 4 Principles of Decision Management System:

• BWTDIM – Begin with the Decision in Mind
• Be Transparent and agile
• Be predictive not reactive
• Test, learn, adapt, improve

I am participating in a Business Agility Radio event on Thursday October 27th at 11:30 am Pacific/2:30pm Eastern (NOTE CHANGED TIME). We’re going to talk for 25-30 minutes about my new book; about what we mean when we talk about decision management; where it is best used and where it’s best left alone; how DM helps companies be more agile (competitive, innovative, proactive); and more. Once we are done I will be participating in a live chat session.

Go to http://www.businessagility.com/radio.asp?doc_id=233343 participate (don’t forget to register).

Cross-posted from International Institute for Analytics

There was a great article recently in the McKinsey Quarterly – The Second Economy. In it W Brian Arthur discusses the fact that

Digitization is creating a second economy that’s vast, automatic, and invisible—thereby bringing the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution.

It’s a good article and worth a read. Brian talks about the systems that drive this economy – that automate decisions so that systems can communicate and collaborate without human intervention. These systems for automating decisions have three characteristics it seems to me:

• They are very agile or “constantly changing” as Brian says – easy to change as needs and circumstances change.
  The digital economy moves faster than the physical one as it has fewer constraints on change – it’s much easier to reconfigure something electronic than it is to reconfigure something physical
• They are analytic – using the data available in the network to decide what will work best
  We have more data than ever before both inside our organizations and in the network as a whole. The systems for the digital economy consume this data analytically, using it to behave in more effective, more profitable ways
• They are adaptive or self-configuring as Brian puts it – testing and learning to see what might work better over time
  Whether people conduct the experiments or the systems conduct experiments automatically, the systems for the digital economy learn and evolve constantly to maximize their value.

These, of course, are the characteristics of Decision Management Systems. To participate in the digital economy your organization needs these kinds of systems so learn to build them.