Working with our European partners (BCS), Decision Management Solutions has scheduled a series of three webinars at 7am Pacific/10am Eastern/16:00CET. Designed to be  live events that work for those in Europe, this is a foundation series on three core topics – Decision Management, Business Rules and Predictive Analytics. There is no restriction on attendance – Americans are welcome too – but they’re all a bit early  for those on the West Coast!

• An Introduction to Decision Management
  02/29/2012 7:00 AM US/Pacific
  Decision Management is a powerful approach for building a new class of information systems.
  Registration
• The use of Business Rules in Decision Management Systems
  03/14/2012 7:00 AM US/Pacific
  Business rules management systems are critical components in the effective development of Decision Management Systems.
  Registration
• The use of predictive analytics in Decision Management Systems
  04/11/2012 7:00am US/Pacific
  Data Mining and Predictive Analytics play a critical role in improving the effectiveness of Decision Management Systems.
  Registration

You can also register for the whole series here.

And for those of you who are based in or near Germany, why not come to the live workshop I am giving this June? Check out the details of my Decisions and Decision Management workshop in Berlin, June 4-5.

I am giving a live 2-day workshop in Berlin, Germany this summer on Decisions and Decision Management.

Organizations must understand how to identify and classify decisions and how to assess the potential for business rules and analytics to support and improve those decisions. They need to understand the available technologies and approaches and the long and short term costs and benefits of these. This workshop introduces the principles of Decision Management and discusses its application to critical business processes as well as the appropriate use of available technology. We walk through how to identify and prioritize the decisions that drive your organization’s success, show how to analyze and design these decisions so they can be effectively managed, introduce business rules as a foundation to automate these decisions, link these decisions to data mining and predictive analytics and discuss how the role of these decisions in delivering smarter information systems.

Delivered as a 2 day workshop this class has several working sessions during which students will work in groups on problems that reinforce the key lessons of the class. These sessions will use both exercises and a company’s own problems. 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

This training is focused squarely on solving business problems and on how the various technologies should be used together. It is vendor-neutral and is for managers and analysts responsible for working with or interested in using business rules or analytics to improve their business and technology experts who wish to build systems and processes that make better decisions.

Register here.

This webinar is at 7am PT, 10am ET and 16:00 CET to support our European customers.

To ensure that Decision Management Systems are analytic and adaptive you must embed the results of data mining and predictive analytics in them. In this webinar you will learn what can be discovered using data mining and predictive analytic techniques and how this can be applied to the decision-making embedded in Decision Management Systems. The role of analytics in predicting risk, fraud and opportunity and the importance of continuous improvement and learning will also be covered.

Register here.

This webinar is at 7am PT, 10am ET and 16:00 CET to support our European customers.

This webinar will focus on business rules and on Business Rules Management Systems as a platform for Decision Management Systems. You will learn how a Business Rules Management System makes the agility and transparency you need possible and what the key components are for an effective Business Rules Management System. The power of business rules to support both policy and analytic rules and the role of decisions in effective business rules solutions will also be discussed.

Register here.

Patrick over at Figurs sent out a newsletter that highlighted an article from 2010 Biggest Barriers to Business Analytics Adoption: People. The article highlighted the people and organizational issues in adopting business analytics and #1 was “Lack of understanding of how to use analytics to improve the business”. While it’s been a while since this was article was published, it was great to be reminded of the issue of business understanding as this remains a critical challenge to adopting analytics, especially more advanced analytics.

In fact this very problem is what has led me to develop a new workshop – Business Friendly Data Mining – that is running at Predictive Analytics World in San Francisco in a few weeks(register here and use code DMSBP12 to get 15% off the price of my workshop). This workshop focuses on decision discovery and on the effective modeling of repeatable decisions to build business/analytic/IT understanding and collaboration. It shows how this focus on decisions-first and an overall decision management framework helps you build the right models and increases the odds of a successful implementation by understanding how the models will need to be implemented. We have used this approach with a number of projects now and found that it fundamentally changes how the data mining team sees the problem and creates new opportunities for collaboration.

There’s also a nice white paper on why to be an early predictive analytic adopter on the Figurs site that you should check out and you might also enjoy our paper on Putting Predictive Analytics to Work. Don’t forget you can register for the workshop here or contact us info@decisionmanagementsolutions.com if you are interested in having an onsite version.

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!

This webinar is at 7am PT, 10am ET and 16:00 CET to support our European customers.

This webinar will introduce the key principles of Decision Management Systems and explain their role in a modern information systems architecture. You will learn what it means for Decision Management Systems to be agile, analytic and adaptive. The four principles of Decision Management Systems will be introduced and the power of Decision Management Systems will be shown with case studies.

Register here.

I got a comment on one of my recent posts asking if I knew of any good free video resources on predictive analytics. While I have some videos up on the Decision Management Solutions YouTube Channel (youtube.com/user/DecisionManagement) I figured some of my readers must know of others. So, if you do, why not post a comment on this blog post with your suggestions.

The first webinar from my ongoing research into Decision Management Systems Platforms is coming up on February 16th at 10am PT – register here  for Four platform capabilities for Decision Management Systems.

This webinar kicks off what will be a continuing series of webinars as our definitive report on Decision Management Systems Technology Platforms comes to fruition in 2012. The report will describes the wide range of technology available – Business Rules Management Systems, Predictive Analytic Workbenches and Optimization Suites, as well as recent advances around in-database analytics.

Based on the initial version of the report, this webinar will describe the four key capabilities of a Decision Management Systems Platform and show how these components fit together into a coherent architecture.

Look forward to seeing you there.

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.