Our new report on Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies has been available for download for a while now and thousands of you have downloaded it. To make it even easier to access (the PDF does not require a registration even) we have made it available online in the main report webpage – just scroll down or use the table of contents to jump to the piece you are interested in. This version will be kept up to date as we enhance the report. Enjoy.

Don’t forget – bookmark decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology to see new versions and subscribe to our newsletter to get notifications of major new releases in this report.

As you probably know by now, we have released the first version of our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology report. This report is available free for download from http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology. This version of the report focuses on four key areas (outlined in the webinar we gave recently and available in our archive here). One of these areas is Optimization and Simulation. To support this I identified the following capabilities, described in the report in more detail:

• Optimization Model Development
• Optimization Model Debugging
• Solvers
• Data Management
• Scenario Analysis
• Deployment
• Repository

You can download the report, and all future versions of it, for free at http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology

If you have comments, feedback or vendors to add please email me info@decisionmanagementsolutions.com

We have released the first version of our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology report. This report is available free for download from http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology.

One of the challenges is that multiple product categories exist in the market for the capabilities we discuss in the report. These product categories often overlap.

While there are many Business Rules Management Systems that just manage decision logic, there are also products that combine the management of decision logic with optimization or with building predictive analytic models. There are also products that are called Decision Managers or Business Decision Management Systems that manage decision logic and other Decision Management products that manage decision logic and build predictive analytic models. Some Predictive Analytic Workbenches include in-database scoring capabilities, some package this separately while model monitoring and tuning is similarly sometimes packaged separately.

Future releases of the report will include additional guidance on categorizing products and on navigating the available product categories. You can download the report, and all future versions of it, for free at http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology

If you have comments, feedback or vendors to add please email me info@decisionmanagementsolutions.com

As regular readers know, we have released the first version of our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology report. This report is available free for download from http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology. This version of the report focuses on four key areas (outlined in the webinar we gave recently and available in our archive here). It also discusses some of the characteristics of products that will help you be successful in developing Decision Management Systems. This section is going to be expanded in future versions of the report but some key characteristics are:

• Platform Completeness
  A small number of vendors offer a complete platform for building Decision Management Systems. It is not necessary to buy a complete platform from a single vendor. It is valuable for products to see themselves as part of a broader ecosystem. For instance Business Rules Management Systems that are “aware” of predictive analytics and offer integration with such systems are more suitable for Decision Management Systems than more narrowly focused products.
• Business User Engagement
  The agility and adaptability of Decision Management Systems crucially relies on the engagement of business users. The extent to which products being used to build these systems can bring business users into the development team is therefore critical. Products that allow non-technical users to fully participate are more likely to be successful that those focused only on technical developers.
• Architectural Flexibility
  Decision Management Systems automate decisions that must often be used in multiple channels where these channels may be supported by different applications and architectural approaches. Decisions may need to be made as part of business processes, in response to events detected or in support of legacy environments. A degree of architectural flexibility is therefore very useful.
• Decision Monitoring
  Products used to develop Decision Management Systems offer much more value if they are able to support the ongoing monitoring and improvement of the decision-making embedded in those systems. Products that provide analysis and other tools that integrate with deployed systems are particularly useful in this regard.

You can download the report, and all future versions of it, for free at http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology

If you have comments, feedback or vendors to add please email me info@decisionmanagementsolutions.com

As regular readers know, we have released the first version of our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology report. This report is available free for download from http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology. The core of this version of the report is the description of four aspects of building a Decision Management System that drive organizations to adopt new, Decision Management System specific, technologies:

• Managing decision logic for transparency and agility
  Decision Management Systems require that decision logic is managed in a way that delivers design transparency, so it is clear how the decision will be made, and execution transparency, so it is clear how each specific decision was made.
• Embedding predictive analytics for analytic decision-making
  This shift from presenting data to humans, so that they can derive insight from it, to explicitly embedding analytic insight in systems using predictive analytic techniques means that organizations will need to adopt additional technologies to analyze their data.
• Optimizing results given real-world trade-offs and simulating results
  Many decisions rely on resources that are not unlimited. Whether these resources are staff, product inventory or service capacity, decisions must often be made in the context of a constrained set of resources. Organizations will generally want to optimize their results given these constraints and this means that trade-offs much be made.
• Monitoring and improving decision-making over time
  The nature of decision-making is that it is often not possible to tell how good a decision will turn out to be for some time. As a result the ongoing monitoring of decisions made and their outcomes is really important. Such monitoring allows for decision-making to be systematically improved over time.

These four areas are outlined in the webinar we gave recently and available in our archive here.

An organization that is established in developing Decision Management Systems will ultimately adopt all technologies for all these capabilities—decision logic management, predictive analytic insight and optimization and simulation. Some will find it useful to have more than one product with the same kind of capability, some will standardize on a single product. The products do not need to be adopted all at once and some Decision Management Systems require only some of the capabilities. Regardless of where you are and where you are going with Decision Management Systems, this report will help you navigate this exciting area.

You can download the report, and all future versions of it, for free at http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology

If you have comments, feedback or vendors to add please email me info@decisionmanagementsolutions.com

Organizations are adopting a new class of operational systems called Decision Management Systems to meet the demands of consumers, regulators and markets because traditional systems are too inflexible, fail to learn and adapt and crucially cannot apply analytics to take advantage of “Big Data.” Decision Management Systems, as I described in my book, are agile, analytic and adaptive. They are agile so they can be rapidly changed to cope with new regulations or business conditions. They are analytic, putting an organization’s data to work improving the quality and effectiveness of decisions. They are adaptive, learning from what works and what does not work to continuously improve over time.

To respond to this growing interest, Decision Management Solutions has released the first version of its new Decision Management Systems Platform Technologies Report. This report is prompted by the growing interest by organizations in Decision Management Systems. It is always challenging to draw the boundaries around such an exciting and growing area, but for practical purposes it must be so. For this report, we are focused on platform technologies used to build custom Decision Management Systems and our goal is to be comprehensive within this scope.

Obviously, established approaches and technologies play a role in the development of Decision Management Systems. Used alone, however, these technologies and approaches tend to deliver systems that are inflexible, static and opaque. To fulfill the promise of agile and adaptive systems that fully leverage “big data”, organizations will need to expand their enterprise architecture to include capabilities from the proven technologies described in this report. Tested and established in many industries, technologies suitable for developing Decision Management Systems include Business Rules Management Systems, data mining or Predictive Analytic Workbenches and Optimization suites as well as new in-database analytic infrastructure and more.

The report describes these product categories and identifies the key capabilities of these technologies. Best practices in their use and key use cases are identified and discussed. A complete list of vendors in the market is provided and an appendix provides more detail on Decision Management Systems.

It must be noted that many vendors have developed powerful pre-configured Decision Management Systems focused on solving specific decision problems such as loan underwriting, claims handling or cross-channel marketing. I have reviewed many such applications here on the blog and for many organizations these solutions are ideal but they are not the focus of this report. Similarly there are vendors that build custom Decision Management Systems for their customers and that have developed powerful platforms for doing so. If such a platform is not for sale to those building their own solutions then it is out of scope for this report.

You can download the report, and all future versions of it, for free at http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology. This report can be freely circulated, printed and reproduced in its entirety provided no edits are made to it. If you would like to publish an extract, please contact us. If you have comments, feedback or vendors to add please email me info@decisionmanagementsolutions.com

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.

Tad Anderson just wrote a great review of Decision Management Systems, my new book, over on his blog on the SOA World Magazine site. Two of his comments struck me particularly. The first summarized what I consider to be the biggest limiting factor in information systems today:

There are not too many systems being created today that I would consider more than interfaces to a data structure.

How many systems does your company have that do more than allow the management of data? Once you eliminate their ability to create, find, update and delete data records what else do they do? They probably allow you to report out the data they store (though this might involve using a separate analytical system) and if you are lucky they might tell you when something is due or when you need to take some action. But for most systems, that’s about it. If they are programmed do anything else they probably don’t do it right – it was perhaps right once upon a time but the business has changed, the regulations have changed and customer behavior has changed so it’s not right any more. As a result, as Tad puts it,

The systems themselves are viewed as a necessary evil by the people who use them.

Most users know they have to use the systems so that the company has the data it needs to operate but that’s about it. How many customer service agents REALLY use their CRM system? How many sales people do more with their SFA system than put in the data that will get them their commission? Does your ERP system really manage your supply chain or production facilities or simply record what happened in them? Do users email each other spreadsheets because it is too hard to get the system to do what is necessary or too hard to change the way it works?

The idea behind Decision Management Systems is to use proven technology (business rules management systems, data mining and predictive analytic workbenches, optimization tools) to create applications that are agile (so they can be changed when you need to change them), analytic (so that they use the data you have to make better decisions) and adaptive (so that they learn and adapt over time). These systems become your partners in running your business not just passive repositories of your data.

Tad points out that we have a ton of material over on DecisionManagementSolutions.com – our “awesome web site” as he calls it. Check out the white papers and briefs in particular. Of course I also REALLY like the last line of the review:

Over all if you are in IT, I highly recommend reading this book.

And if you haven’t already bought it, you can do so on IBM Press (35% discount code TAYLOR4389), on amazon.com (book and Kindle version), on Barnes and Noble (book and nook version) and on InformIT, Pearson’s site.

2011 has been a great year for market awareness of Decision Management as an approach and of the value of Decision Management Systems. Product, partnership, acquisition and funding announcements have enhanced the available technology. As vendors continue to improve and enhance their product offerings to fully support Decision Management this is only going to reinforce and further grow the market.

There is a wide range of technology available for building Decision Management Systems. Business Rules Management Systems, Predictive Analytic Workbenches and Optimization technologies can be used alone or in combination to build custom Decision Services. In-database analytics and other analytic infrastructure can be used to maximize the effectiveness of predictive analytics.

In each Decision Management Systems platform product category, products will be reviewed and key elements for successful Decision Management Systems (such as for business user analytic modeling, in-context rule management, decision simulation etc) identified and highlighted with “badges”. Customer case studies and use cases will be used throughout. An index of vendors and product categories will be provided. The list of vendors identified to date are listed below (if you have suggestions for additional vendors, please drop me a line at info@decisionmanagementsolutions.com).

The report will be available free to download as a white paper and as a web page at decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology where we currently have links to our existing First Look product reviews.

Obviously one of the challenges with a report like this is deciding who to include. With that in mind we have identified a few criteria:

1. While there are many innovative companies developing complete solutions – pre-configured Decision Management Systems – we will be focusing in this report on tools for building custom systems. To be included it must be possible to build a custom Decision Management System with the product.
2. The technologies must be productized, released, for sale, and must have at least one production customer who can be contacted.
3. The product should be sold generally, not only to companies that have also bought a pre-configured application – it must have customers and a market presence as a genuine platform technology.
4. The business rules, analytic or optimization technology involved cannot only be an OEMed product that is included separately in the report.

There is no fee for vendors to participate and everyone will be covered, sponsor or not.

We have begun work on this report and will be releasing it over the first two quarters of 2012. The first installment of this report will include the business case for Decision Management Systems, the overall technology architecture and a list of product categories and vendors. Over the following months we will publish First Looks on all the technologies involved and several updates to the report:

• Initial report early Q1 2012
• Report update with “badges” late Q1 2012
• Report update with customer stories and use cases early Q2 2012
• First complete report late Q2 2012
• Report update for new/revised products Q4 2012

We will announce each new release and all the related activities in our newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.

Candidate Vendors

• 11Ants
• Angoss
• Attensity
• Be Informed
• Bosch Software Innovations
• Clario Analytics
• Experian
• FICO
• FuzzyLogix
• GDS Link/Modellica
• Gurobi
• IBM
• IDIOM
• Infocentricity
• InRule
• Jboss
• KNIME
• KXEN
• MathWorks
• Microsoft
• OpenRules
• Oracle
• Pega/Chordiant
• Predixion
• Progress/Corticon
• Revolution/R
• Salford Systems
• SAP
• Sapiens
• SAS
• Sparkling Logic
• Statsoft
• Teradata
• Tibco
• Transunion
• usoft
• Yottamine
• Zementis
• Zoot

Don’t forget, if you have suggestions or comments on the vendor list please email us at info@decisionmanagementsolutions.com.

Fred Balboni gave the Business Analytics and Optimization keynote. You can get a “faster planet” without analytics, just by automating processes, but you need analytics for a “smarter planet”. Fred began by introducing the results from the IBM Institute for Business Value study. The new survey had three interesting results:

• The gap between analytic leaders and others is starting to grow
  The number of people saying that analytics gives them an analytic advantage has grown by 57% year on year. Analytics is being seen increasingly as a point of competitive advantage. And those that report this tend to out perform their competitors. In the number of companies saying that they have been transformed by analytics is up 23% and experienced companies were up 66% (aspirational beginners were down).
  In terms of usage, analytics in basic operations and finance are increasingly widely accepted (table stakes). Customer management, strategy and planning, HR is where there is a difference in usage between experienced and transformed organizations. But the usage rates are still low overall here so there is a lot of work yet to do.
• Competitive advantage requires mastery of three competencies
• Manage the data as a trusted platform
• Understand the data, analytic skills to generate insights
• Act on the data, not enough to know things must act on this knowledge
• Two distinct paths to analytic sophistication
• Collaborative path where focus is on working with multiple organizational units to string things together and make analytical decisions. These tend to be large programs however which is tricky in the current economic climate.
• Specialized path driven by a line of business focused on building a focused capability first.

Three steps are recommended:

1. Know where you are, be honest
2. Focus on improving your analytic competencies across information foundation, culture and analytic skills.
3. Have a strategic plan, an information agenda

All good advice but, to my mind, still missing a strong focus on how (technically) to deploy analytic insight into operational systems and processes.