I am speaking at a series of IBM/Information Week events this quarter on “Process Excellence: A Route to Better Business.” I will be speaking on BPM and Decision Management for Smarter, Simpler, and More Agile Business. The third  is in Denver, CO on March 22nd and the main session starts at 8:30am MT. I will be kicking off the session with “BPM and Decision Management for Smarter, Simpler and More Agile Processes.” Attendees will get a copy of my book.

Registration here.

I am speaking at a series of IBM/Information Week events this quarter on “Process Excellence: A Route to Better Business.” I will be speaking on BPM and Decision Management for Smarter, Simpler, and More Agile Business. The second is in Columbus, OH on March 7th and the main session starts at 8:30am ET. I will be kicking off the session with “BPM and Decision Management for Smarter, Simpler and More Agile Processes.” Attendees will get a copy of my book.

Registration here.

I am speaking at a series of IBM/Information Week events this quarter on “Process Excellence: A Route to Better Business.” I will be speaking on BPM and Decision Management for Smarter, Simpler, and More Agile Business. The first  is in Dallas TX on February 15th and the main session starts at 8:30am CT. I will be kicking off the session with “BPM and Decision Management for Smarter, Simpler and More Agile Processes.” Attendees will get a copy of my book.

Registration here.

I am giving a webinar with Talend on February 7th at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern on holistic integration – the combination of data management, application integration and business process management for best in class integration.

You can register for the webinar here.

Talend has been around for about 6 years and the original focus was on “democratizing” data integration – making it cheaper, easier, quicker and less maintenance-heavy. They originally wanted to build an open source alternative for data integration. In particular they wanted to make sure that there was a product that worked for smaller companies and smaller projects, not just for large data warehouse efforts.

Talend has 400 employees in 8 countries and 2,500 paying customers for their Enterprise product. Talend uses an “open core” philosophy where the core product is open source and the enterprise version wraps around this as a paid product. They have expanded from pure data integration into a broader platform with data quality and MDM and a year ago they acquired an open source ESB vendor and earlier this year released a Talend branded version of this ESB.

Talend 5 is a “holistic integration platform” with a newly announced OEM of BonitaSoft (they were already using the workflow capabilities of BonitaSoft in their MDM product). Talend 5 now embeds the complete Boniasoft product. This gives them data integration (historical core), process integration (BonitaSoft) and application integration (ESB)

There are 5 elements to the core Talend platform

• Common design environment across all three elements, including the BonitaSoft elements being OEMed
• Shared project repository for artifacts and metadata
• Single deployment approach
• Single runtime environment
• Single monitoring and management platform

A single platform really helps with projects that combine multiple elements (data integration and BPM say) – Talend try to make it easy for organizations to adopt additional elements by reducing the learning curve through common tooling etc.  Nevertheless Talend remains committed to providing best of breed elements in each case. The product supports the increasing array of cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments with particularly strong support for hybrid clouds. They support “Big Data” quality and integration tools that run inside Hadoop and allow companies to handle this data the same way they would handle data stored elsewhere. They also embed the JBoss Rules engine and JBoss Guvnor for rule management. This obviously allows for both simple business rules on the integration and data quality side and more complex embedded decision-making.

Good decision-making relies on data being delivered to the point of decision. An approach to data integration that focuses on the use of data for a specific solution while allowing a broad-based, coherent integration architecture to be developed incrementally feels like the right approach to data integration in a decision management context.

Gladys Lam kicked if off by introducing the three chairs of the conference – Kathleen Barret Chair of IIBA who heads up the business analysis tracks, Roger Burlton of BPTrends who heads up the business process tracks and Ron Ross of BRSolutions who heads up the business rules forum tracks. The three chairs then came on stage to get started. Five questions provided the framework for the panel with each chair answering the questions in their own way.

1. What challenges do organizations face today that this conference will prepare you to tackle?

• Ron Ross
• Business Agility – “it’s not the strongest or most intelligent of species who survive but the most adaptable”. The depressing statistic is that organizations spent a huge amount of money on systems maintenance – perhaps 75% of totals. The problem, he says, is that many systems are over-engineered and hard to change – they have been built to last not to change – and that business rules (especially those for decision making) have been hard coded into these systems
• Business Communication was his second point. The inability of business and IT to communicate due to a lack of shared vocabulary is a big problem
• Managing business know-how – we are living in a knowledge economy but we don’t act like we do. We focus on efficiently producing code not on managing the know-how that drives that code. Making the know-how explicit helps you retain and reuse this know-how. Time for BUSINESS Architecture not just technical architecture
• Kathleen Barret
• Change is a constant and this remains a serious challenge for organizations. Organizations have to be “on their toes” and many of them are afraid after the recent economic challenges – they don’t know what to do. Critical thinking, looking at business in a critical way, is going to be crucial to making the right choices and changes in business.
• Roger Burlton
• Agreed with the previous speakers and emphasized that “Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt” are rampant making it hard to get investments made in new ways to do things. We all know we have to change but executives are afraid of making the wrong choices. There is a particular fear of silver bullets and the need to balance multiple things – processes, events, architecture and decisions – is key.
• Vocabulary is also top of mind for Roger – being able to communicate effectively is key

For each area of the conference, what capabilities do you need to be effective

• Roger Burlton
• We have to establish common objectives and common vocabulary but also some common ground – motivational alignment. This is a key point I think as aligning decision-making, processes and objectives make a huge difference. Only then can we get a common set of practices.
• Remember, people OUTSIDE your organization don’t care what your architecture is, what your organizational chart is or how you do things. They care about the results they get from you so always start outside-in.
• Don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis and don’t over-model. Remember you are re-wiring the house while the lights are still on!
• Ron Ross
• The first area is that of those things that exist, are known and proven and the second is new things that are emerging. This is the 14th year of the business rules forum and every year there are great cases. Why then has it taken so long for the message to get out there??
• Manage rules separately from process, requirements, systems and you will do better with more agility, more control, better understanding. Late binding of the rules to the processes (through decisions presumably). Manage these rules to maximize their value.
• Start with projects and build an enterprise view over time – don’t try and build an enterprise rule model from scratch.
• Adopt a “rule-friendly” methodology – like the one Ron and Gladys have in their new book, the one in Agile Business Rules Development or the one in my new book Decision Management Systems.
• Adopt one of the solid, proven  business rules management systems out there.
• Three emerging capabilities – BUSINESS management of rules (transparency, traceability), vocabulary, decision analysis (one of my favorite topics)
• Kathleen Barret
• All the pieces of a business do not exit in isolation – the idea is to describe and manage the business and that means fitting all these pieces together. Think about how you will be successful going forward – what will you need to learn to make this happen
• Everything you need is at this event and you need to pull them together – not just about analysis, also about rules and process and architecture.

How do these capabilities relate to the other conference areas and together how will they enable you to become even more effective?

• Kathleen Barret
• Determine how each element is going to help you at your organization – think about the projects and work you have going on and identify your personal needs so you can find what you need.
• Roger Burlton
• The idea of the conference is that all these pieces can and should work together. Separate these different themes or topics, learn about them, and then re-combine to solve each specific process
• Roger pointed out that data (and analytics) has not come up yet and reminded people not to forget it
• Just deal with the fact that you have to have lots of pieces and use them appropriately (and differently) for each project
• Business analysts have become pretty good at soft skills and Roger pointed out that some of the other roles at the conference should grow their soft skills
• Ron Ross
• Business rules and process are both required and need to be part of your analysis of problems/design of solutions
• There’s no conflict between rules and process – they are complementary
• Ron also recommended Roger’s recent work on a business process manifesto

They talked about how attendees can make the most of the event by participating and talking to their fellow attendees as well as listening to the presentations.

What are the most important takeaways?

• Roger Burlton
• Roger reminded us that the industrial revolution took 150 years to happen so we might have to be patient while “a couple of generation of managers die off”
• Learn something and go do it – don’t try and boil the ocean
• Bring your experience back to next year’s events
• Ron Ross
• Recognize that the case studies PROVE you can get orders of magnitude improvements in business agility without being on the bleeding edge
• It’s about working smarter not harder
• You will have to change – you can’t get there by doing more of the same. Agile programming won’t get you business agility.
• Ask how well your current approaches are working and focus on capabilities not just software
• Kathleen Barret
• Cannot look at problems the way you used to look at them. You have to try a different perspective, go outside your comfort zone
• Look critically at your own company
• Put what you learned to work in a specific, limited project first!

I am speaking at a series of IBM events this fall and next spring focused on “Improving customer service with BPM and decision management“. The second is in San Jose, CA on December 8th and the main session starts at 9am PT. I will be kicking off the session with “BPM and Decision Management for Smarter, Simpler and More Agile Processes”.

Registration here.

I am speaking at a serious of IBM events this fall and next spring focused on “Improving customer service with BPM and decision management“. The first is in Reston, VA on December 6th and the main session starts at 9am ET. I will be kicking off the session with “BPM and Decision Management for Smarter, Simpler and More Agile Processes”.

Registration here.

I got an overview of JBoss’s new intelligent, integrated enterprise approach as well some of their new product announcements. They are adding new data services, BPEL support, productizing their event/rules combination and adding some new connectivity elements.

The world has obviously changed in the last few years. The fully automated processes of the past, JBoss feels, seemed complete but allowed fraud and bad customers to get through a rapid process as easily as good ones. Essentially companies pushed the automation of processes past the point where the technology could handle it – the processes were too static and too hard to change and there was not enough decisioning intelligence in the process. Today we have changing regulation and markets, increasing business event streams that need to be considered, decisioning that needs to be more sophisticated, and customers want error-free self-service. Fraud is continuing to be an issue with more of it being sophisticated and organized. An integrated enterprise is still a good thing but now it needs to be able to cope with this accelerating pace of change in events and decision-making.

This is a challenge as we generate more and more data and more events. Time to answer or delivery has compressed significantly. Algorithmic trades have gone from 50ms to 1ms, phone activation from 3 days to 1 minute, data warehouses from 1 week old data to 1 hr old data and so on. This accelerating data and event stream can result in a partial view of customers that don’t update quickly, events that are handled tin an adhoc manner rather than in a business-centric way, and decision-making that is simplistic or manual. This environment cannot be fixed by adding a manual steps to catch problems, at least not without really irritating customers and slowing things down.

IT needs to enable an intelligent, integrated enterprise. This means supporting observe, integrate analyze and respond steps.

• Observe events and bring them into the IT infrastructure using an enterprise service bus-based approach
• Integrate applications and the rest of the infrastructure to process the business event
• Analyze what is happening using data, rules and complex event processing.
• Responding using processes based on BPM standards like BPEL or BMPN2

JBoss sees its open source stack supporting this whole environment. Their Enterprise Data Services supports an ESB as well as data and application access. This can be extended with their low-latency, high performance MRG-Messaging environment to external cloud-based data sources. All of this is supported by their Enterprise BRMS (the commercial version of Drools). This last supports rules, event processing and the combination of the two. JBoss sees the integration of rules, events and process as the driver of the next wave of BRMS adoption.

A BRMS offers easier change so that decision-making logic can be more adaptive and dynamic – replacing code that is too hard to change quickly and accurately. This is particularly important as more dynamic logic is needed in lots of areas like supply chain event handling, compliance, governance and risk, marketing and sales logic for interacting with customers etc. Many of these areas also need better handling of events as well as handling of streaming data, “Big Data” and analytics. JBoss has some customers, such as Emirates Airlines, already moving to this kind of environment.

RedHat’s SOA product strategy is to deliver an enterprise-class SOA middleware stack built on their core open source products and the supporting community. These include their RedHat Enterprise Messaging platform as well as JBoss Enterprise Data Services, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, JBoss Enterprise BRMS and the JBoss Operations Network.

Product updates in this announcement:

• The Enterprise SOA Platform can support EAI/SOA/Event-driven paradigms as well as workflow, orchestration, intelligent routing etc. The 5.2 release includes support for WS-BPEL, certification of RedHat Enterprise Messaging, an update of the BRMS as well as a component refresh and a new release of the studio.
• The JBoss Enterprise Data Services platform supports master data services, data governance and enables reporting/analytics. The 5.2 release adds new data sources (Teradata, Netezza, Ingres, JSON, Mondrian), REST-ful data services, WSDL and XSD in the repository, a component refresh and the new studio.
• The Red Hat Enterprise MRG Messaging is based on the AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) messaging protocol designed for supporting a rich set of application semantics across different application platforms (Java and .Net for instance) that is scalable, supports diverse workloads and takes advantage of hardware performance advances.

Plus of course they have released a new version of the JBoss Enterprise BRMS. In this new release the rule engine has been extended to handle both event processing and rules processing. The definitions for both are stored in a repository that can be managed using web-based tools for analysts as well as Eclipse-based tools for developers. Rules can be authored in spreadsheets, decision tables, as DRL (rule code) or using Domain Specific Languages or templates. Sessions can also be managed and monitored.

The new Enterprise BRMS uses Drools’ ability to handle sliding time windows, stream processing, temporal constraints and other event semantics to process potentially very high volumes of events. It supports both what you might call “event cloud mode” where events and facts are loaded and processed as a group as well as “stream mode” where events are time ordered and where the event lifecycle and flow are managed (allowing the detection of missing events and the use of sliding time windows). Temporal relationships such as before, overlapped by, finished before, happening during and more are supported in the rules engine. This allows rules to be used to reason against these events. All of these event processing operators can be used in the same editors available for regular rules such as DSLs and decision tables.

I have blogged before about the work the Drools team has been doing on defining a new rule sheet or decision table. This is a web-based, spreadsheet like editor for business rules. The new version handles multi-hit tables and single hit tables. It has nice features for merging cells, grouping cells, sorting by column, support for otherwise, typed columns etc. Templates can be defined to restrict the data that can be entered into the decision table, to ensure that only allowed values are used for instance. The templates and decision tables can also now be embedded into other applications or web-based mashups, allowing them to be seen alongside dashboards or application data.

With the new release, rule monitoring now plugs into the JON (JBoss Operations Network) so that the rule engine can be monitored like any other piece of the infrastructure. This includes monitoring active rules in sessions, detecting long running sessions, monitoring parameters for sessions etc. Other improvements include a preview of some support for backward chaining, free form expressions in constraints and some performance enhancements.

Here is a recap of Decision Management product news for Q2 2011

Business Rules

• First Look Corticon 5
  A long established vendor in the business rules management space, Corticon describe themselves as focused on delivering better, faster decisions by automating business rules.
• First Look – OpenRules Decision Management System
  OpenRules allows business users to manage rules directly in Excel, OpenOffice or Google Docs (allowing collaborative rules management).
• First Look – Sparkling Logic
  A social, cloud-based environment designed to help companies find the best, most defined decision logic. 
• Update – New Wisdom RuleGuide
  RuleGuide manages information about decisions, rule families or rule sets, and a glossary of terms. It also provides analysis and governance for these objects. 

Data Mining and Predictive Analytics Platform

• Update – Angoss
  Release 7.5 of their data mining and predictive analytics software.
• First Look – Revolution and Netezza
  Recently announced partnership that supports both the creation of models in-database and the execution of the models in database.
• First Look – Yottamine
  Yottamine is focused on helping companies build predictive models.
• First Look – 11Ants Analytics
  11Ants Analytics is a spin-off out of the University of Waikato (the source of the WEKA project), and has commercialized technology for automating the production of predictive models.
• Update – Zementis
  Predictive decisioning platform, an update on recent announcements, partnerships and new features.
• IBM’s Big Data Platform and Decision Management
  IBM has recently announced a new strategy for bringing Big Data to the enterprise.

Optimization

• First Look – Drools Planner
  Drools Planner is a sub project of the Drools project that started 4 years ago as Drools Solver.
• First Look – OpenRules Rule Solver and Rule Learner
  Along with traditional Business Rules components, OpenRules includes two other important decision management components.

Decision Management

• First Look – Oracle Real-Time Decisions Manager
  Oracle’s core Decision Management product, RTD’s execution model is as a pure play Decision Service.

Business Process Management

• Update – Software AG
  An update from Software AG after they announced webMethods 8.2 and ARIS 7.2.
• IBM Business Process Manager 7.5
  The new Business Process Manager 7.5 brings together the WebSphere Lombardi Edition and WebSphere Process Server in a single go-forward product. See also IBM Websphere Update

Applications

• First Look – Activant DynaChange rules
  Activant (who recently agreed to be acquired and merged with Epicor) is an ERP provider focused on distribution and retail.
• First Look – Talent Analytics Advisor
  Solutions that provide relevant information to help companies anticipate the impact talent has on their business goals. 
• First Look – G Stat
  Advanced analytical and data mining solutions.
• Update – In2Clouds
  Update on added support for ensemble models, moved to allow private/hybrid cloud deployment and completed their service definition API.

Business Intelligence

• First Look – Information Builders
  Business intelligence (BI) and enterprise information integration/management (EIM).