Adaptive Control

Predictive Analytics are important no matter what IBM thinks

December 19, 2008

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 [...]

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Decision Services as agile, intelligent agents

December 19, 2008

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…

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Powering Next-Generation Predictive Applications with Oracle Data Mining (ODM)

December 2, 2008

Charlie Berger of Oracle presented on Powering Next-Generation Predictive Applications with Oracle Data Mining (ODM). Charlie joined Oracle from Thinking Machines about a decade ago and have been putting machine learning algorithms into the Oracle kernel. Data Mining, in database or otherwise, sifts through data to find hidden patterns, discover new insights and make predictions. [...]

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Using Decision Management for Customer Retention

November 10, 2008

CRM Daily had a nice little article on Customer Retention that reminded me of the example I often use for how the elements of decision management contribute to more effective customer retention decisions. Large organizations spend vast sums on retention – one bank, for instance, spends $1Bn annually – and retention is a perfect candidate [...]

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Hotwire.com Revenue Management

October 28, 2008

Darren Koch presented on Hotwire.com’s use of ILOG business rules in revenue management. Summary:

Ongoing segmentation and optimization help businesses serve customers
Smart testing + flexibility = better service = higher profits
Continues to show ROI that is increasing over time

Hotwire.com was founded in 1999 to help travel partners (who invested) sell excess inventory without driving down prices [...]

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Evidence-based (decision-centric) CRM Processes

October 22, 2008

Graham Hill wrote a piece on Evidence-based CRM that focused on evidence-based CRM programs and it made me think about evidence-based CRM processes.
To me, evidence-based CRM means customer relationships, and thus customer treatments, that are based on evidence (data) and not judgment, hope, guesswork etc. It means

making offers that you have evidence this customer will [...]

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Decision Services – A Pattern for SOA

October 7, 2008

I just finished presenting at the SOA Symposium and if you are interested in my presentation you can find it on slideshare.
Previous in series Next in series

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Finding hidden decisions in business processes

September 24, 2008

Scott Sehlhorst (with whom I have presented and about whom I have written before) had a great post this week called Hidden Business Rule Example. Scott walks through some analysis of a process and shows how finding hidden decisions within that process can really inform how you think about the systems and processes you need. [...]

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Impact Modeling and Maximizing Marketing Return

September 22, 2008

Nina Shikaloff discussed an analytics technique that I had not heard of – Impact Modeling. Impact Modeling is a decision modeling technique. Decisions on acquiring customers – what to offer for instance – managing customers and handling difficult customers are all important and it can be tricky to identify better ones. Impact modeling is about [...]

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As content on demand grows, so must decision management

September 10, 2008

The Conference Board recently announced strong growth in online content or content-on-demand. The press release can be summarized by this comment:
Fundamentally, consumers expect content to be available when they want it, and on the screen of their choice
This, of course, creates both a challenge and an opportunity for those providing content. The challenge is that [...]

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Predictive Marketing (Lessons from the CMO Summit #3)

September 9, 2008

Stephan Chase of Marriott generated the third set of thoughts. He is working to make Marriott more customer-centric, in particular by employing predictive modeling to determine what customers are likely to do in the future while using results in marketing to create a learning organization. This is of course the heart and soul of decision [...]

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First thoughts on the IBM/ILOG announcement

July 28, 2008

I got a chance to speak with ILOG today and do some thinking so it’s time to write more about the IBM and ILOG announcement. As it is an acquisition of one publicly traded company by another neither company can legally say very much. As a result I, like everyone else, have a bunch of [...]

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Transpromotional marketing with EDM

July 18, 2008

Transpromotional marketing – yes, another new phrase that I heard for the first time this week. Wooing Customers in a Weak Economy was the source – an article on 1:1. Chris Stone wrote the article and it talks about the need to use different channels to contact customers and to do so consistently and in [...]

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Enterprise Decision Management and the Software Development Lifecycle

July 14, 2008

One of my regular readers had a question today about Enterprise Decision Management and the Software Development Lifecycle – the EDMSDLC if you like. Here’s what he asked:
We do Business Rules in our approach… I guess one question would be, where does EDM fit in a typical SDLC? [company] does Requirements, we have a method [...]

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First Look – Strategy Director

July 1, 2008

One of the things I like to do on the blog is bring attention to those companies applying the principles of Enterprise Decision Management to deliver useful, smart enough systems. I recently came across Strategy DirectorTM from Stratagem Portfolio Services. This uses EDM to deliver analytics and strategy support for collections.
The product is built on [...]

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Here’s how to get started with decision management

June 12, 2008

When I talk to folks about decision management they sometimes seem intimidated by the complexity of the problem and the sophistication of organizations that have invested heavily in the approach. Here, then, are some thoughts to help you get started.

Begin – even if the first version is not perfect or even close.
Automate the decision even [...]

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Using Decision Management to improve healthcare communication

June 10, 2008

I have just finished presenting on the last of a series of roadshows for Silverlink. I was one of a series of presenters for their Think Different seminars. I presented with Kinney Zalesne (author of Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes), Liz Boehm (Healthcare analyst at Forrester) and Fred Jubitz (recently of American [...]

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Automating Decisions within Business Processes

May 21, 2008

I can’t blog this session live as John Rymer and Mike Gualtieri have asked me to participate. What follows is a combination of thoughts based on the presentation and post-presentation notes.
The theme of the presentation is that “The next frontier in business process management (BPM) and business rules is automating decisions within business processes”. If [...]

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Decision Management, Operations Research and BI

May 5, 2008

I spoke to Seth Grimes last week about an article he was writing that just published on Intelligent Enterprise -What BI Practitioners Can Learn From Operations Research. As I was reading the article I also noticed a response over on Michael Trick’s OR blog -Business Intelligence and Operations Research. Both Seth’s article and Michael’s response [...]

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Live from InterACT – Automate, Improve and Connect

April 29, 2008

Paul Daro was next giving some detail around the new architecture (introduced by Bernhard Nann). A number of trends were identified first:

Clearly the move to a collection of services from monolithic applications has fundamentally changed the relationship of vendors to customers – now more about delivering services that can be fitted in to an overall [...]

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