JT on EDM

A quick note to point out some newly available resources on decision management.
First, Claye Green of Technology Blue (a Decision Management Solutions partner) wrote a nice little piece on barriers to decision management success.
I have been busy too, writing some shorter briefs on Decision Management topics. These are available without registration from the Decision Management [...]

I got a chance to get an overview of the latest release of Oracle Real-Time Decisions, 3.0. This is the platform for real-time decisions on which various applications (for call center, web etc) are built and sold as part of the Oracle Applications suite.
The vision of this product is to optimize “return on attention” – [...]

Ginger Conlon had a nice post this week – Don’t Blast. Target. – Think customers: The 1to1 Blog.
many marketers are still drawn to the ease of blasting to a broad audience, instead of targeting for maximum impact among those most likely to respond
If you are trying to make this transition from blasting to targeting – [...]

A little while ago I got an interesting question from a reader about champion/challenger testing  – an element of adaptive control. Check out this brief on Adaptive Control or read the chapter in Smart (Enough) Systems for details on the approach. Anyway, here’s the question:
When testing a champion strategy with challengers, I assume sample [...]

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
Last week I posted a couple of times about my impressions from the SAS Global Forum. In one post I said that “SAS customers talk about the great results they get when they put their predictive analytics to work in operational systems” so I thought I should expand on that a little, using [...]

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
Madeline Albright gave a great presentation at the SAS Global Forum in Washington DC this week. Several of her bon-mots are in the title but there were many others, some of which are below. Each of them struck me as relevant to readers of this blog:

Facts not Fears
Businesses all too often do things [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ
John Reynolds over on the Thoughtful Programmer had a great post a little while back – 19th Century BPMS. In it he said
I sometime find it useful to describe a BPMS in terms of things and people that you probably would have found in an office or factory in the 1890s
This struck me as [...]

With the business world in a state of flux and everyone worried about what might happen next, and how they might respond to it, scenario testing (and its compatriot, stress testing) should be top of mind for executives. They should be thinking about different scenarios, testing out how those scenarios would effect their business and trying out various alternatives. On the risk side they should be using this kind of scenario planning to stress their assumptions – stress testing – to see how their financial reserves would cope with the various alternatives.

For too many executives, however, this kind of testing is done only at the aggregate level and done largely (if not completely) in Excel. I have nothing against Excel but this is clearly not really acceptable. Good scenario or stress testing should consider how customers, products, suppliers, locations will be impacted by the scenario at a granular level and then present rolled-up results, not simply attempt to model some averages or totals. Similarly, if executives want to develop alternative scenarios that would be effective in certain possible futures then they need to test those scenarios against actual transactions, actual customers, to see if they work.

Companies that have adopted decision management have the infrastructure to manage this. Decision management brings the crucial decisions – choices of actions – into the open and makes them explicit. Scenarios can be developed for these decisions and tested against real data. The results can be compared against what happened, or against alternative scenarios to see what would work best. Different assumptions can easily be fed into the decisions to see what impact those assumptions have and stress testing or scenario development conducted based on the results. Decision management makes all this possible. It’s still work, but it is much less work and the results can be much more precise and grounded in real decisions.

A growth in scenario management was one of my predictions for 2009 and Jim Sinur wrote a nice piece on this too – Scenario Planning is No Longer Optional.

Doug Henschen had a blog post on IBM today that caught my eye – Will IBM Add Analytics to its Toolbelt? in which he quoted Ambuj Goyal (who heads up information management at IBM) as saying predictive analytics are overrated. Sadly this reminded me of the old days of IBM – when FUD (fear, uncertainty [...]

Two articles I saw recently (Is SOA Enabling Intelligent Agents? and Three Keys to Enabling Agile Business Services) made me think about decision services in the context of agility and of so-called “intelligent agents”. Clearly SOA, web 2.0 and network-centric…