agility

IBM IMPACT 2011 Day 2 Keynotes

April 12, 2011

Steve Mills kicked off day 2 to talk about the kind of IT architecture that supports business agility. Your IT architecture, he says, must enable business processes run reliably and securely across application silos. Business must own their processes and their data, not have them be subsumed into siloed packaged applications. IT must enable these [...]

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Decision Management: Orchestrating Consistent Enterprise-Wide Decisions

April 11, 2011

As companies move to this more changeable, uncertain world that requires a coordinate extended enterprise, it is essential to manage decisions as well as processes – not by using process management to manage decisions but by managing decisions alongside processes. These operational decisions – micro decisions – are the front line in driving business agility [...]

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Opening keynotes at IBM IMPACT 2011

April 11, 2011

Nancy Pearson and David Farrell kicked off the main event. 8,000 people at IBM IMPACT apparently and Nancy introduced the key themes – helping companies optimize for growth and focus on delivering results. The topics are based on a continued focus on getting business and IT to work together (a key theme of Decision Management [...]

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Standard processes, custom decisions

March 9, 2011

I gave a webinar on Smarter ERP with Decision Management and one of the tweets during the presentation – “Standard processes, custom decisions” prompted a few requests for more details. So, here goes.
When I talk to companies about their ERP implementations we often end up discussing the balance between standardization/globalization and flexibility/localization. These companies invested [...]

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Decision Management and Insurance – Business Optimization and Governance

February 24, 2011

Strategy Meets Actions’ research reports that insurers have tens, hundreds, even thousands of initiatives. To achieve these goals, aligning the business and IT is critical, as is setting the right priorities, and ensuring technology investments support these priorities.
Decision Management focuses on the key business decisions, and moves away from a focus on functional processes and [...]

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Decision Management and Insurance – Rethink Legacy and Fast Path New Product Development

February 17, 2011

Insurers face huge challenges with their installed base of legacy mainframe applications.  Many systems are 15-20 years old and are impeding insurers’ ability to respond to the market demands for new products and to the increased rate of consumerization. Maintenance costs are high and staffing challenges continue to mount.
Growing consumer buying power will force property [...]

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Webinar: Legacy modernization with Decision Management and Business Rules

February 1, 2011

Many organizations’ agility and responsiveness is hamstrung by their legacy systems. Replacing them wholesale is impossible but the constraint they impose on the business is unacceptable. In this session I will show how you can use Decision Management and business rules to avoid replacing the whole application while still maximizing [...]

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Business rules, accelerating change and Decision Management

January 4, 2011

Randy Heffner had a post late last year that I just got to – Business 2011 Gets Faster; Business Rules And SOA Policy Get More Important. Randy makes the key point that while the pace of change means you cannot afford to lock up your business logic in traditional code, you also can’t just let [...]

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Information Week Webinar – What, exactly, do you mean by business rules

December 1, 2010

[ December 9, 2010; 11:00 am to 12:00 pm. ] I am presenting at an IBM/Information Week webinar What, exactly, do you mean by business rules on December 9th. I will try to clear up the confusion between rules and decisions, explaining why this distinction is critical if you expect to incorporate improved agility into your organization’s ability to respond to market demands, competitive actions [...]

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Unum – Managing business rules #bbc2010

October 19, 2010

Subtitled “from 0 to 1400″, this case study discussed how Unum (an insurance company) introduced business rules. Back in 2009 their rules were scattered, siloed, hidden in requirements documents and in different formats (from code to if/then statements to long verbose notes). And even though they tried to focus on rules, [...]

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What, exactly, do you mean by business rules

October 8, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
Scott Cleveland had an interesting post this week on the single greatest benefit of BPM that included the information that 17% thought it was “Change business rules and processes without impacting underlying applications”. This focus on agility is not, perhaps, surprising but it prompted an interesting comment from John [...]

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IBM Business Analytics and Optimization #bas2010

September 28, 2010

Rob Ashe and Fred Balboni kicked off the IBM Business Analytics Analyst Summit with a presentation on IBM’s overall strategy for analytics – product and consulting in an integrated view. Of course this is IBM so everything starts with Smarter Planet – and Smarter Planet begins with how to get insight to drive better performance, [...]

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Webinar – Simplifying over-complex processes

August 30, 2010

One of the prime causes of over-complex processes is the inclusion of decision-making in process designs. Organizations that identify the decisions in their processes and manage them as peers – not part of the process but supporting it – find they can simplify process designs, increase agility and bring business users and IT into better [...]

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Speaking at the Bay Area Metrics User Group

May 25, 2010

[ June 2, 2010; 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm. ] I am speaking at the Bay Area Metrics User Group (MUG) and Metrics Special Interest Group (MSIG) meeting on Performance Management & Agility – Wednesday June 2 3, 6-8pm.
Significant investments have been made in performance management systems that purport to enable organizations to manage better [...]

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Flexible yet permanent – the power of business rules

May 18, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
Sapphire, SAP’s big show, is on this week and I have been following the twitter stream (I was invited but couldn’t make it). Merv Adrian (@merv) had a sequence of posts about some SAP customers (Shell and Unilever) that really struck me:

Shell … “Once you pour electronic concrete, it’s hard to get out.”
Unilever: [...]

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Smarter systems at the Drools bootcamp

April 21, 2010

I presented at the Drools bootcamp today – Smarter systems for uncertain times. Check out the slides below and the whitepaper on my company site.
Smarter systems for uncertain times
View more presentations from Decision Management Solutions.

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Performance Management, Decision Management

April 21, 2010

I presented on the role of decision management in adding agility to Performance Management to the BI SIG of the SDForum last night. Here are the slides and Paul O’Rorke blogged a summary.
Performance management and agilty
View more presentations from Decision Management Solutions.

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Detect, prevent, manage claims fraud

April 12, 2010

Insurance claims fraud is a huge deal, with most estimates seeing perhaps 10% of claims made being fraudulent – worth at least $30Bn/year. As a result the value of small improvement is huge. Of course, from my perspective, fraud is one of the classic uses of decision management and predictive analytics. Obviously the current economic [...]

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Some thoughts on business agility

April 6, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
Johan den Haan had a great post on Business Agility through Model Driven Development in which he had 3 things important to driving business agility:

Provide short feedback cycles.
…From the start you need iterations, a lot of them.
…finally learn from the production system by monitoring it and feeding that [...]

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Presentation to the SDForum Business Intelligence SIG

March 26, 2010

[ April 20, 2010; 6:30 pm to 9:00 pm. ] I am speaking on Performance Management and Agility at the SDForum – Business Intelligence SIG in Palo Alto:

The need to balance performance monitoring and decision management to maximize both awareness and agility.
How Decision Management transforms your investment in instrumentation into an investment in agility.
How Agility translates to direct impact on your key business priorities-cost competitiveness, [...]

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