Nice article on predictive analytics in insurance

January 5, 2012

Patrick Sugent wrote a nice article on A Predictive Analytics Arsenal in claims magazine recently. The article is worth a read and, if this is a topic that interests you check out our white paper on next generation claims systems or the series of blog posts on decision management in insurance that I wrote after I did a [...]

Read the full article →

Start with decisions not with business rules

January 4, 2012

An interesting discussion started on twitter this week with @BigBlueMilky saying “Decision Management is so much more that just using business rules” – something I strongly agree with. @JeffreyGoodReq followed up by adding “But you must start with business rules” and, when I disagreed and said you must start with Decisions added “rules = context [...]

Read the full article →

Giving retail banking customers what they want

January 2, 2012

Jim Davis of SAS had an interesting post back in October - What do retail banking customers want?- in which he talked about the results of some consumer surveys and the banking industry’s response. The three results Jim discussed were clarity and fairness, easy access and quality customer experience. Interestingly I see all three of these [...]

Read the full article →

Are your systems just interfaces to a data structure?

December 29, 2011

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 [...]

Read the full article →

International Institute for Analytics predictions for 2012

December 21, 2011

The International Institute for Analytics predictions for 2012 have been posted to the IIA website. Check out what Tom Davenport, the rest of the faculty and I think about the new year in analytics. And if you are interested in predictive analytics in the cloud (my prediction), go to our company site here.

Read the full article →

Building a predictive enterprise – webinar recording

December 19, 2011

I gave a webinar with AllAnalytics on “Using Predictive Analytics: Secrets to Creating a Successful Predictive Enterprise” last week and Shawn Hessinger has just published a nice blog post with a summary. The recorded webinar is here and the slide are below and on SlideShare. As I said in the presentation I believe there are 5 key elements [...]

Read the full article →

Definitive Report on Decision Management Systems Platforms coming in 2012

December 15, 2011

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 [...]

Read the full article →

New podcast about Decision Management Systems

December 15, 2011

Listen to Peter Schoof podcast with James Taylor, head of Decision Management Solutions and the foremost thinker and writer on decision management. James has a new book, Decision Management Systems: A Practical Guide to Using Business Rules and Predictive Analytics, which we discuss in the podcast as well as predictive analytics and BPM.
You can get access to the [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – Starview

December 13, 2011

Starview Inc. have just launched their new platform – Business Analytics and Optimization Platform (BAOP). Growing out of a long standing consulting practice, the company sees an opportunity for a platform aimed at the continuous optimization of decision-making. They are focused on Telco, Finance, Energy and Manufacturing (especially Semiconductor) and they have a vertically-oriented strategy, [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – Update on InfoCentricity Xeno

December 12, 2011

I got an update from InfoCentricity recently. InfoCentricity are a software company focused on delivering a web-based, advanced predictive analytics workbench (Xeno). They were founded back in 2000 have been releasing various components of their Xeno platform since then as well as a first application based on this platform (Campaign Analyzer). Xeno4 is the new [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – Netuitive

December 8, 2011

Netuitive provides predictive analytics for IT. Based in Reston VA and founded in 2002 they have over 50large enterprise customers and 300 more through OEMs. Their solution is designed to prevent degradations and outages to critical applications and services by providing an intelligence layer on top of existing monitoring systems. Companies use the software for [...]

Read the full article →

Some thoughts on the levels of automation of a decision

November 18, 2011

A recent post on the IBM Good Decisions Blog – When Should You Automate a Business Decision? contains a list of ten levels of automation from a paper by Parasuraman, Sheridan and Wickens (available to IEEE members here). This set of 10 levels runs from 1 (computer offers no assistance) to 10 (computer acts autonomously). [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – Spotfire 4.0

November 14, 2011

I got a quick update on Spotfire 4.0 recently (announced today – I last reviewed Spotfire in February). This release was aimed primarily at getting analytics to a wider audience through analytic dashboards and social collaboration. As we all know, many people work with others in different locations and time zones. This requires strong context [...]

Read the full article →

Eliminating bias and valuing customers with Decision Management Systems

November 14, 2011

Meri Gruber, VP Biz Dev here at Decision Management Solutions, had a post a little while ago that she recently tweeted – How many service reps does it take to change a light bulb or lose a customer? In it she makes the point that a company lost her business because the customer service department [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – SAS Enterprise Miner 7.1

November 11, 2011

I got an update on Enterprise Miner™ from the folks at SAS recently. Enterprise Miner is their development tool for data miners and predictive analytic specialists and is a graphical environment for designing and executing the steps in the creation of a predictive analytic model. Enterprise Miner 7.1 was part of the SAS 9.3 release [...]

Read the full article →

Predictive Analytics in the Cloud – results available now

November 10, 2011

We have announced the full results of our Predictive Analytics in the Cloud survey. The results are available as a white paper and as a recorded webinar – go to smartdatacollective.com/predictive-analytics-cloud to register for all the deliverables. There were some interesting results and I thought I would share a few.

The core focus for predictive analytics, [...]

Read the full article →

Analytics: The widening divide. An IBM/MIT Sloan study

November 8, 2011

I listened in to IBM’s call about their recent analytics study conducted with MIT Sloan – The Widening Divide (available from www.ibm.com/thewideningdivide). This is the second year for the analytics study and surveyed 4,500 people from 30 industries and 120 countries – a very broad view. Three key results:

The competitive advantage created by analytics is [...]

Read the full article →