I am speaking at an event in Dresden, Germany on Decision Management (details here) on June 7 17:00 – 19:00 CET. I will be giving an introduction to Decision Management.

Business processes and business logic are two sides of same coin. Without an explicit consideration of business rules, process models can be incomplete and topics such as “compliance” is not considered.  In addition to the representation of business rules, we need above all a methodology to collect and manage the business logic.  This will be a relaxed discussion on the topic of “Decision Management”. I will cover why organizations need to understand and analyze decisions and point out the possibilities that come from the introduction of a systematic management approach to decisions.

The number of participants is limited so please register by e-mail to info@enterprise-design.eu - It is a first-come, first served event! 

I do a lot of work with companies and organizations adopting business rules and Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) such as BRFplus and NetWeaver BRM. I wanted to share two things (as I head off to Sapphire/ASUG).

First, I often find that when organizations start with business rules they begin by just trying to capture business rules the way they would capture any other kind of requirement in their blueprint. This is not an effective approach and results in what I call the “big bucket of rules.” As I said on my blog earlier this year, you need to start with decisions not with business rules. Identifying the decisions that can and should be automated, decomposing these into their dependent pieces and then identifying the rules for each piece is a much better strategy and is the basis for my work in Decision Management and my recent book on the topic - Decision Management Systems: A Practical Guide to Business Rules and Predictive Analytics (see Carsten Ziegler’s comment on the book here). Begin with the decision in mind.

Second I find that organizations often don’t think about business rules and decision management as solutions to their problems. To help with this I have found a number of things are worth looking for in a project – these will make business rules and decision management a good candidate:

• The requirements are driven by policy or regulation documents
  Decisions around eligibility or validation based on these are often effective when implemented using a BRMS
• There is a requirement for regular or rapid change
  If the business want to make changes to behavior regularly, or if the pace of change is picking up for a module, it is almost certain to be a decision-making component and business rules will be a good basis for automating it.
• There are complaints about usability
  Many complaints about usability arise because the users are being forced to use the system for something it could do itself. An approval screen might be “unusable” and generate many complaints if someone has to use it for every transaction. If the Approve decision is handled by a BRMS 80 or 90% of the time then the usability of the screen may not be so much of an issue.
• There is an overcomplex process
  Mixing decision-making into process designs often results in very over-complex processes and using business rules to automate some of the decisions in the process can result in smarter, simpler and more agile processes.
• There is a plan to use analytics
  Using analytics to change the behavior of a system can be difficult unless you understand which decision the analytics are trying to improve and have control of that decision because you have implemented it in a BRMS

The good news for anyone coming to ASUG/Sapphire 2012 is that Carsten Ziegler and I have a couple of sessions on these topics. On Wednesday at 3pm he and I are hosting a micro-forum on “Smarter, Simpler Applications with Decision Service Management.” Carsten is the author of a great book on SAP’s rule engine BRFplus and the discussion will focus on decision service management (DSM) – a strategy that helps make business processes and systems more efficient and more agile.

After that, at 4:15pm, he and I are presenting on “Building Flexible, Easy-to-Change and Rock-Solid Applications with BRFplus Decision Services:”

SAP ABAP business applications can be rightly described as high performance, robust and rock-solid. Making them also flexible and easy to change is a challenge faced by many companies. Taking control of the critical decisions in these applications by developing BRFplus decision services resolves the challenge, giving business experts more insight into mission-critical decisions taken by the system. With BRFplus, business users can make the right change, right now without destabilizing the application or using over-stretched IT resources, improving process quality and compliance. The approach will be illustrated with real cases and TCO/ROI examples and a demo will show the creation of a decision service, implementation, and continuous improvement by business experts. Presented by a leading expert in decision management systems and the chief product owner and inventor of BRFplus, this approach can easily be applied by nearly all SAP customers to their critical business problems.

The session is in S310F

Decision Management and the use of business rules has tremendous potential for SAP customers. To help realize this value, Decision Management Solutions (my company) has become an SAP partner. We are already working on some BRFplus projects and we look forward to helping organizations see where Decision Management and business rules can offer a high ROI to SAP customers. If you have questions, drop me a line at jtaylor@decisionmanagementsolutions.com

Cross posted from my blog on SAP SDN

I am giving a webinar with Gagan Saxena (@Gagan_S), CIO of Apple Vacations on A New Approach to Business Design at Apple Vacations on May 22, 2012 at 10:00 am PT, 1:00 pm ET.

Gagan and I will present how how Apple Vacations applied Decision Management to redesign the consumer experience and create a “smart system” that would bring the new capabilities of business rules management, analytics, big data, predictive modeling, complex event processing and natural language processing into the organization.

I hope you can join us. Register here.

I am speaking at a series of IBM/Information Week events this quarter on “Process Excellence: A Route to Better Business.”  This one is in Cary, NC on May 17 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.” These sessions are great with lots of content and plenty of opportunities to ask questions. 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.”  This time it is in Toronto on May 15 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.” These sessions are great with lots of content and plenty of opportunities to ask questions. Attendees will get a copy of my book.

Registration here.

I am giving a webinar with Gagan Saxena (@Gagan_S), CIO of Apple Vacations on A New Approach to Business Design at Apple Vacations on May 22, 2012 at 10:00 am PT, 1:00 pm ET.

Gagan and I will present how how Apple Vacations applied Decision Management to redesign the consumer experience and create a “smart system” that would bring the new capabilities of business rules management, analytics, big data, predictive modeling, complex event processing and natural language processing into the organization.

I hope you can join us. Register here.

There’s still time to register for the 2-day workshop in Europe next month. This covers the essentials of Decision Management, the effective use of business rules and Business Rules Management Systems and the role of analytics:

• Berlin – June 4/5 – Register here.

The class covers:

• An introduction to Decisions and Decision Management
• Categorizing and identifying decisions
• Characteristics and design of decisions
• Managing decision logic
• The role of decisions in systems
• Getting started and first steps

Hope to see you in Berlin.

Johan Gerber of MasterCard kicked things off on day 2. MasterCard does not actually issue the cards with their logo on, they are a technology company that provides a network to link consumers, 32,000,000 businesses and 22,000 card issuers. The network is very high performance, handling 100 pieces of information and processing each transaction in less than 130 milliseconds and can handle 14B instructions in a second.  Security, back up, data management and volumes are all extreme. To build this network, MasterCard partner with IBM to provide Decision Management and message handling. They can now deploy new rules for a bank issuer in just a few hours using hot deployment of rules directly into the IBM platform within their network. Rules for regulatory requirements, to manage a fraud attack or to deliver new products and services deployed directly to the network more or less immediately. This immediacy drives opportunity for new product innovation, product differentiation and more.

After a very cool demo of some future thinking, Steve Mills came on to follow up. Steve’s focus is on transaction processing – how to manage transactions with certainty, with control and with suitable response to problems. Obviously IBM has a long history in managing transactions, helping manage the structure and execution of transactions in an ever more complex environment. With 800M+ payment card transactions a day, projections of 10B proximity transactions in 2016 and other scale and mobility challenges must intersect with transaction management capabilities to ensure that the infrastructure can support these transactions. Steve pointed at MasterCard’s network as well as Marriott’s that handles 1,500 transactions/second with sub-second response times, China Mobile’s 148M transactions/day from 600M customers. Support for these kinds of networks means handling process integrity and ensuring that a high percentage of transactions get through without errors or problems. This was hard enough with a single, coherent, integrated system. With the kind of distributed, heterogeneous environments common today this problem has just become more challenging.

This is what IBM is trying to deliver with its platform. IBM continues to invest in its transaction processing capabilities, making sure that companies can use SOA and get the kind of scalability and integrity they need while taking advantage of the modularity and agility of SOA. Steve sees a particular focus going forward on integrating mobile, handling big data and in-line analytics as well as cloud deployment and social media.

Katie Linendoll introduced the next customer story, The Ottawa Hospital. The critical challenge with hospitals and medical delivery generally is that the technology cannot disrupt the interactions between medical professionals and patients. Part of the solution to this is the use of mobile devices, so that medical professionals can use technology at the bedside. This builds on the general availability of an electronic medical record, a foundation or “step 0” capability. But you also need to manage the processes and decisions involved too. Ottawa Hospital is trying to manage the processes for consistency, completeness and to keep patients and medical professionals engaged in the care process. In particular they focus on the end to end process from check-in to check-out.

The use of mobile devices allows them to replace paging with a more interactive communication, allowing the “paged” doctor to access the record of the patient, confirm they are coming etc. The devices allow the doctor to show patients information and images particularly. The hospital is also managing the large numbers of people involved in care, both at the hospital and after discharge. The system will allow everyone involved to see and contact the rest of the people involved. Of course if you can add decision management to this you can do things like automatically manage discharge regulations and policies, identify dangerous drug interactions, check dosages and more.

Phil Gilbert, VP of BPM and Decision Management, came up next to show off his new release of Business Process Manager. Last year they announced release 7.5, the first integrated set of process capabilities post the Lombardi acquisition. Since then they have also merged the Business Events and Business Rules products into the new Operational Decision Management product. Both these products deliver visibility and governance at scale for businesses and Phil is clearly proud of how integrated and flexible these products are. Beyond this the team is continuing to integrate these products into z/OS, into Tivoli Security Management, the MDM product, the Advanced Case Management/ECM product and SAP. In each case the integration is beyond the execution level offered by SOA and includes design-level integration. The new platform, release 8, is in Phil’s view the first of a new class of platform that lets you truly integrate existing applications into a flexible process and decision platform.

With version 8 of BPM and Decision Management the focus is on real-time collaboration across the functionality. New features being demonstrated today include a new decision console, a global rules search, a new more social process portal, a designer for coaches, real-time task collaboration and in-line task completion. The existing decision console is web-based and less technical than the Eclipse editor for business rules but it is still pretty technical. The new interface is much more Blueworks-like with a nice look and feel with a social tone showing comment streams, supporting the following of rules, recent edits, collaboration etc. Users are taken directly to the right editor with a re-written editor as well as a new Facebook-like timeline and support for global search. A radically redesigned interface that is clearly aimed at business users working on business rules.

Similarly the BPM portal has been re-written to focus on a more social, task-oriented interface. This is also supported by a completely documented set of APIs so that customers can integrate their own elements. Redesigned coaches allow some nice forms for working the tasks and Phil was very bullish about the new designer for these, claiming it is dramatically easier to develop these interfaces. The task interface displays an information stream about the specific process instance including all those who have worked on it. The interface also uses analytics to predict who might be useful to add to the process instance based on their previous work. Real-time collaboration is possible with people in different locations working on the same task at the same time. Both task editing environments show what the other is doing in real-time. Finally Phil picked up his iPad and showed how you can access BlueWorksLive and Business Process Manager from the app complete with nice UI, photo attaching and more.

BodyMedia came up next to talk about their new tracking device and the associated decision management system. BodyMedia has a body sensing device that collects information about your activity, health and well being. They have conducted studies showing weight loss and health management being more successful when the body sensing technology is used. Whether it is managing weight, sleep or diabetes, the senor provides information both to the person being monitored and their care givers.

The solution involves an arm band with four embedded sensors reading 5000 data points a minute. This information is fed through machine learning algorithms and other decision management systems and the results are fed back to laptops, mobile devices etc. The armbands are getting smaller, cheaper and more capable. The software processes the data and displays usable results like quality of sleep, calories burned, amount of activity and more. The use of business rules to build a decision management system allows them to personalize and direct the advice and suggestions being made. In the future this could be combined with a smart home to make your home environment an active participant in managing your health.

Bob Suter came on to talk about mobile. 10 Bn mobile devices by 2020, 60% of CIOs put mobile as a priority and mobile apps can generate 45% improvements in productivity. Clearly he says mobile matters and is affecting every industry. To bring mobile to bear on problems you need to build the systems and connect the devices, you have to manage the devices and handle security and only then can you extend and transform your business using these mobile devices. To support all this IBM has released a new Mobile Foundation including an IBM version of Worklight (a recent acquisition), WebSphere Cast Iron and an endpoint manager for mobile devices. Plus IBM has launched some new services to help, including some quick start consulting packages.

And with that, I have to go get ready for my session.

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.

After a great introductory session from Walter Isaacson (biographer of Einstein, Franklin and Jobs), we kicked off the main session at IBM’s largest IMPACT conference with over 8,500 attendees with a focus on re-thinking IT.

Marie Wieck started by discussing how core applications are changing. IBM claims that $5Trillion run on IBM hardware. These systems must be increasingly integrated with Billions of mobile devices – everything from smart phones to sensors like the Bodymedia armbands. This drives a need for cloud, for open APIs, for automated interactions (powered by decision management systems presumably). More of the transactions handled by IBM systems are being initiated using multiple channels, mobile devices and new forms of communication. Meanwhile more people have an impact on your business both business contacts and consumers, increasingly using social media of various forms. Cloud, mobile, social and more are creating an interconnected economy. To support this IBM believes you need an open, robust SOA that can handle the different kinds of workloads, transactions and interactions being driven by this change- new development patterns, new cloud deployments, new APIs and new Apps.

Whirlpool came up next – another 100 year old company with $19B in revenue across 170 countries. This drives them to create an IT platform focused on globally scalable value chain solutions. Consumer engagement is changing as the web channel moves from simply seeking information on a web page to a more interactive, social environment that involves e-commerce and can be mobile, global. Global transactions in the value chain are scaling in volume and the need to support a global supply chain makes for ever more complex transactions. These trends push Whirlpool to aim for a platform that is geared for real-time global engagement. Scale, reliability are critical – you can’t just chase the latest cool technology, you must deliver reliable real-time transactions.

Marie came back to talk about some of the requirements that customers have asked for that are driving IBM products:

• Faster release cycles (weeks or days not months or years) driving better visual tooling, smaller footprint and improved support for virtualization in the application server.
• Demand for mobile devices and a rich user experience on those devices is driving a new mobile foundation that supports Android, iOS and Windows with a single development platform and management server.
• The need to integrate BPM, decisions and analytics to support a complex logistics platform, for instance, has driven a new release of the BPM product with a new portal for collaborative work as well as support for cloud deployment and mobile integration.
• New releases in the SOA platform include updates to MQ and Message Broker focused on performance and broad integration with common industry standards. A Cast Iron Live makes creating and releasing APIs quicker and easier while providing stronger tracking of API usage for ongoing analysis.

Huntington Bank came up next, founded in 1866 with total assets of $50B (just big enough to be Fed regulated) and 11,000 employees (small enough to be nimble) with a very mid-west focus. To make progress in the current financial climate, Huntington has been somewhat contrarian with a focus on eliminating fees and making it easier for customers to avoid penalties. While this did hit their fee revenue per account, it has been more than offset with new business. To support the changing business, the IT department has refocused on skills-based ITIL shared services organization rather than silos. A focus on agile, on shared services and on information integration have been key. They have moved from a highly customized aging legacy platform to a new WebSphere platform. This is great but it’s more important as a platform for processes and decisions with the BPM and business rules products that will allow faster time to market and more business empowerment.

Marie returned to talk about challenges. With 25% of IT projects being over budget and 34% still being deployed behind schedule IBM is offering its new IBM PureSystems that combine built in expertise, integration and cloud readiness. At IBM IMPACT they are launching PureApplication and Jason McGee showed a high speed video of the 4 hours they claim it takes to install. All the software is pre-installed and power and network cables can be plugged in to connect it. A wizard links the system to the network and then the system initializes itself. A web configuration tool is then available to push new applications on to the server. Over 150 applications from IBM and partners are available for rapid install to the system, which handles all the configuration, workload management, monitoring and more for these applications. Failure management is built in (and was demonstrated by Jason pulling out a node live on stage). A new development kit and a cloud sandbox are being released to make it easy for companies to develop deployable patterns for PureSystems. These will allow a single code base to be deployed on to PureSystems in a data center or to a cloud deployment.

The session wrapped up with a nice shout out to partners (Decision Management Solutions is an IBM partner) and to IBM Champions (including yours truly).