I will be participating in the Analytics Executive Symposium being run on June 26th in Chicago by the International Institute for Analytics of which I am a faculty member.

The Analytics Executive Symposium is a unique and professional gathering of analytics champions who come together to hear and discuss the latest findings and research in analytics. The Symposium will feature the bi-annual meetings of IIA’s Analytics Research Councils (ARCs) for the Health Care and Retail industries. Special focuses on Analytics in the Enterprise will also be featured.
Please note: this is a by-invitation-only forum for IIA members.

Register here if you are an IIA member. To join contact the folks at IIA here.

I recently participated in an article in the Teradata magazine - A Beautiful, Cloudy Forecast – based on our research on predictive analytics in the cloud. As the article says:

The basic value proposition of predictive analytics in the cloud is clear: Organizations can make predictive analytics more scalable, more pervasive and easier to deploy. For many of the challenges organizations face in their journey to becoming analytic organizations, cloud-based solutions have much to offer.

Companies interested in this area can get all the details from this survey on our company site – decisionmanagementsolutions.com/predictive-analytics-in-the-cloud-survey-results. If you want any help getting started with predictive analytics in the cloud, drop us a line at info@decisionmanagementsolutions.com.

I am speaking on Business Friendly Data Mining on Day 2 (June 26) of Predictive Analytics World Chicago at 10:40am CT.

Organizations that are more sophisticated with analytics are more likely to be top business performers. But too often there are gaps in understanding between business, IT and analytics teams. Gaps in building business understanding lead to analytic models that don’t have business value and gaps in implementation lead to models that take months or years to adopt or never get adopted at all. Wasted effort and “good” models that just sit on the shelf gathering dust are the result. In this session, James Taylor outlines some proven techniques for improving business/analytics/IT collaboration, clarifying data mining goals and enabling rapid deployment of models in systems.

Register for Predictive Analytics World here.

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.