I recently spoke to an interesting company getting serious about analytics and looking for some staff. Drop me a line james@decisionmanagementsolutions.com if you are interested and I will forward your resume along:

• Data Mining / Analytics Business Analyst
  Senior Business Analyst with data mining and predictive analytics experience to lead the establishment of a decision support system that will drive major improvements in our business processes and marketing efforts. A key component of this platform is to mine our data warehouse to determine the analyst and client behaviors that drive profitability. To have an impact on our business, these insights and real-time recommendations will be integrated into our existing Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms.
  This position will be part of the Technology Management team. The team consists of project managers and business analysts who manage a variety of technology initiatives on behalf of the business unit. They are responsible for managing projects from initial concept to deployment, working closely with stakeholders, including Research Analysts and management in the business unit, as well as IT colleagues in the development, support and training areas.
  This role requires a candidate with a strong background in statistical analysis, predictive modeling experience, writing business requirements and managing complex projects. The successful candidate will provide end-to-end project management from requirements gathering and analysis, through implementation, and post implementation support.
• Database Analytics Manager
  Database Analytics Manager to lead the establishment of a decision support system that will drive major improvements in our business processes, marketing efforts and enable the business to compete on analytics.
  A key component of this platform is to mine our data assets to determine the analyst and client behaviors that drive profitability and the Research report characteristics that can best satisfy our clients needs. To have an impact on our business, these insights and real-time recommendations will be integrated into our existing applications; such as Business Intelligence (BI), Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems and Research document Authoring and content portals.

Accenture and SAS announced today that they will jointly create an analytics group focused on financial services, healthcare and public service. They describe this as a “significant evolution of the existing relationship between the two companies”. The release is at  http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/AccentureSASAnalyticsGroup.html

This is obviously an interesting announcement. Ever since IBM announced its new Business Analytics and Optimization service line I have been waiting to see what Accenture would do. The announcement that they will be working more closely with SAS makes perfect sense for them – they needed a set of analytic software around which to work and on which to focus. Given their history of working with SAS, and SAS’ industry position, SAS was an obvious choice.

It has always seemed to me that SAS was challenged by the range of companies with whom it works. With everyone from IBM to Accenture to many small specialty companies using SAS, the temptation to focus on “playing nice” with everyone must be strong. Making a more public commitment to working with Accenture has some risk in this regard but is, I think, a good move for SAS. Accenture has a good track record with analytics, is participating in the building of awareness (through its surveys and through working with Tom Davenport on his books Competing on Analytics and Analytics at Work for instance) and has the development/organizational change skills that need to be wrapped around analytics to transform businesses using those analytics. The only thing I see lacking from this partnership is the technologies you need for operational delivery of analytics – specifically business rules management integrated with business process management/event management. The highest value analytic projects require making those analytics actionable in the context of operational processes – decision management in other words – and the partnership does not have the same assets in this regard that IBM has acquired through its acquisition of ILOG, FileNet, Lombardi and its development of its WebSphere stack.

As with all partnerships the devil’s in the details. How many consultants will be trained, how will joint customers and prospects be developed, how tight will the technology relationship get and so on. Over the coming months we will see the answers to these questions. I hope to get updates from Accenture and from SAS also so look for more on the blog as I do.

Overall I think this is a good move for both companies. Add it to IBM’s commitment to analytics and to building an analytics practice and the trend is clear. Those large consulting firms that don’t yet have a strong analytics practice need to get with the program. This is already a fast moving area it looks set to accelerate.

Three job openings today. Decision Management Solutions partner Technology Blue is looking for a couple of experienced Blaze Advisor resources for a project starting March 1:

• Senior Business Analyst: Full time resource with experience in business rule harvesting and analysis, process oriented, able to develop and implement processes, must be comfortable leading knowledge transfer and training sessions. Experience with Blaze Advisor. 10+ years of IT experience, 5+ years of business analysis experience, 3+ years of Blaze Advisor / business rules experience. Preferable to have experience with insurance / finance industries.
• Senior Rule Architect: Full time resource with experience in all phases of rule development life-cycle, experience translating requirements to flexible and maintainable rule repository architectures, experience developing testing and change management processes, must be comfortable leading knowledge transfer and training sessions. Experience with Blaze Advisor. 10+ years of IT experience, 5+ years of Blaze Advisor rule architecture experience. Preferable to have experience with insurance / finance industries.

Contact Claye at info@technologyblue.com if you are interested.

On the analytic front, a position in DC

• Director Economic Research
  Responsible for reporting economic forecasts and their impact on the industry and the organization. Provides advice to higher management on a variety of economic issues. Responsible for research on macro-economic trends, interest rate forecasts and affordable housing goals. Prepare regular written research reports which summarize the findings, including estimates of expected current year business results. Communicate their recommendations on economic public policies or company procedures to executives and internal departments.Typically has post-graduate degree with 4 – 7 years of related experience and 2+ years management experience or bachelors degree with 7 – 10 years related experience and 2+ years management experience
  Key focus of the position is on estimating loan loss reserves and credit loss forecasting, including related analytics, presentations, and controls. Ability to quickly frame analytic problems/issues, solve them, and package results, often under tight deadlines. Demonstrated ability to direct research as well as do it independently.
  SAS skills are essential; knowledge/experience with UNIX environment valuable.

Contact Rex Huston at rhuston@maisearch.com if you are interested.

Anyone with project management/rules/decisioning experience interested in working in Australia this year, drop me a note james@decisionmanagementsolutions.com as I might have an opportunity for you.

I got a briefing from my friends at Savvion and their new colleagues at Progress Software (Savvion is being acquired by Progress).

Progress has been positioning itself around operational responsiveness – responding to opportunities and threats in real time, to what’s happening right now: What are competitors doing right now and can we adjust pricing, what are customers doing and how does that impact our retention plans for them etc. Progress’ customers have been increasingly asking them for responsive business processes and this drove the acquisition.

A survey they did in October 2009 seems to show that this idea of operational responsiveness has gone from being a nice to have to a competitive necessity – 94% for instance saw the ability to respond in real time as critical to their business – but remains very difficult – only 8% currently respond to information in real time and most hear about problems in customer service, for instance, from customers themselves. When customers say what they need for operational responsiveness they ask for things that Progress has broken down into 3 buckets:

• Real-time business visibility
  Understanding what is happening in existing processes and systems despite a complex, messy existing architecture) – maps to Business Transaction Assurance (Progress-Actional)
• Immediate send-and-respond
  E.g. when a high value customer is on the website or when risk hits a certain level – maps to Business Event Processing (Progress-Apama)
• Continuous business process improvement
  Closing the loop – maps to Business Process Management (now Savvion BPM)

In other words Savvion BPM completes the three key building blocks for Progress’ vision of operational responsiveness. Savvion was selected for their event-centricity, the breadth of their capabilities (including their work on BRMS and document management for instance), their vertical industry solutions and the overall business-centricity. They also liked the enterprise-class customers and projects they saw in the Savvion client base as well as the cultural fit.

We had a good discussion about their plans to integrate the products, bringing process management, event management and decision management (business rules) together. Hopefully I will get an update on the core Apama product at some point and I will blog about it when I do.

Overall I think this is a good thing – the need for a platform that combines Process Management, Decision Management, Event Management and Performance Management is clear and this announcement moves Progress/Savvion closer to this vision.

Savvion was a client of mine in 2009 and I have reviewed their BRMS product.

Here at SAP Tech Ed 2009 and my first session is an executive Q&A. First up was some discussion of the day’s announcements:

• Extension of engagement with HP, integrated Neoview with Business Warehouse so customers can combine Business Objects and Neoview. as well as extending the services relationship (obviously important given HP’s acquisition of EDS).
• SAP EcoHub (SAP’s partner marketplace) is a year old now and is being extended to the 1,100 service partners not just products. This continues to grow and is good for SAP because it allows partners to bring the specialty knowledge of specific niches to the general platform of SAP applications.
• Working with Open Text more to improve the handling of large volumes of text, clearly a focus area for many companies as they try and move from only handling structured information in their information systems.
• Business Suite 7.0 is the most modular as well as the most extensive version. There are now more than 3,000 services being surfaced that can be orchestrated with Netweaver and the process orchestration features.

Social media, and the integration of all of this into processes and crowd-sourcing, is clearly going to be a focus area. SAP believes, correctly, that someone joining the workforce today will expect to use social networking technologies everywhere and this needs to be built in. Especially when it comes to BPM and distributed teams, social media is clearly going to have a role.

An interesting question came up around the focus on unstructured information and the parallel focus on governance, risk and compliance/identity management. SAP sees these coming together over time as GRC must include unstructured information. And of course this leads back to social networking and communities.

The challenge of change came up in several questions and Vishal took a look at programming approaches. Roughly ever 10 years, Vishal says, a new programming language/programming model comes to the fore. The question then is how to construct long-lived software applications given this rate of change. In addition, SAP is starting to provide cloud-based services so they can be consumed in composite applications. Business By Design, for mid-markets and in limited release, is cloud based but clearly SAP does not see cloud computing as critical to its future. Interesting.

Anyway, more of an executive chat than a real Q&A.

One of the questions I get regularly can be summarized like this: I see how a decision service works when it returns an answer but can it return multiple answers? As one reader put it:

Suppose we want to go from India to the USA. There are number of alternatives and many flights that are available. How can we generate these alternatives and how can we implement this in web service? What are the inputs to this service and what are the outputs? How can we store these alternatives in a web service?

At one level these kinds of decision services are the same as any other kind – they take data in, they make some kind of choice from available outcomes and they pass back the results of this choice. There are generally three reasons a service is being designed to return multiple answers:

• There are multiple answers that are acceptable and the calling application is going to present them to a human user who will then make a choice.
• While there is a “best” answer there are likely to be other answers that are not quite as good and it will be helpful to document the next best answers either to help a user understand what else was considered or to allow a fall-back strategy without having to re-invoke the decision service,.
• There is a ranked list of alternatives, from best to worse, that it makes sense to present in some circumstances. The calling application can decide to use only the best or to use some combination of them in order.

Obviously these are minor variations of each other.

The principles for building a decision service are the same – determine what data is going to be required when the service is invoked (so this data can be packaged up and used to call the service), determine what output is required (in this case a list of output records of identical format) and determine how to choose between them. If the decision service is going to be allowed to retrieve additional data to help make a decision then this will need to be defined also.

In the specific example we will probably pass in our requirements for the flights (choices about routing, schedule, price etc) and have the decision service reach out to get all the possible flights that meet the minimum defined criteria. The decision itself is likely to use some business rules that use our preferences to find acceptable and preferred flights as well as perhaps some analytic models that help us score each flight for acceptability (such a model having been developed by analyzing the data on what flights people actually booked and how happy they were with the choice, for instance). Each flight that is determined to be acceptable (passes the rules and some minimum prediction of acceptability) is assembled into the result set (which includes the score) and then this package is returned.

As far as the calling service or process is concerned it simply asked a question (“What are the acceptable flights for this set of criteria from most to least acceptable”) and got an answer. The complexity of the decision is encapsulated in the service and can be evolved, changed, improved as and when appropriate without impact on anyone else. All of this is essentially identical to the kind of decision service that returns a single answer.

The Decision Management Solutions webinar series starts this week with an introduction to the 5 core principles of decision management. Next week sees Eric Siegel present on optimizing business decisions, how best to apply predictive analytics. There’s one or two most weeks (unless I am gone speaking at a conference) and you can use the registration page for the series to register for several at once.

I was reading Campaign Management Needs A Reboot by Suresh Vittal – Forrester Research recently as part of preparing for a webinar with Surresh (he and I are both presenting at a Unica webinar on Centralized Decisioning on the 22nd of this month). The paper make some great points and I particular liked the 8 principles Surresh describes, which include enabling dialogues not just campaigns and bridging offline and online, inobund and outbound. He identifies a centralized decisioning capability using rules, arbitraiton logic, business constaints and policies as central to this, including analytics in his discussion of analytically derived rules.

I recently wrote a white paper for Unica called The Case for Centralized Customer Decisioning (registration required) and you can register here for this webinar on centralized decisioning.