Posts tagged as:

Business Agility

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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If IT can’t get you there, perhaps decision management can

December 18, 2008

Dick Lee had an interesting post titled We Know Where We’re Going, But IT Can’t Get Us There. He made a number of points of which three stood out: Business often fails to communicate effectively to IT Poor process definition…

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Customer Centricity Strategy #3 – Mass Customization

December 17, 2008

Wrapping up my responses to John Schmidt’s post on Customer Centricity with a discussion of Mass Customization. John describes this as managing trade-offs and building sophisticated models to customize your response to each and every customer based on their value…

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Can the business use decision management technology without IT help?

December 16, 2008

Inspired by a post of Jim Sinur’s – Can the Business Really Use BPM Technologies Without Help? – I started thinking about the decision management corollary: Can the business use decision management technology without help?
Regular readers will know that I often refer to the dirty secret of business rules:
Business users don’t want to “maintain rules” [...]

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SOA is necessary for agility but not sufficient

December 8, 2008

Fred Cummins had a post on the topic of measuring agility in which he gives two ways to assess how well SOA supports agility.
When a business change is considered

how many services must change to accommodate the new business requirements
for services that change, how significant are the changes

It is this second point that interests me. When [...]

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Business Rules, Decisions and Processes

December 5, 2008

Mike Kavtiz wrote a nice post on Agile SOA: Empower the Business with Business Rules Engines. One of the things his post shows, however, is that business process notations don’t do a good job with decisions. Mike has to annotate his diagram to show where he used rules. He could have considered one or more [...]

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Using decision management to prepare for an unknown future

November 18, 2008

Recently, Ronan Bradley discussed the challenges for banks in the area of compliance, given the rapidly changing environment. He made three specific points with which I agree and that I think shows the value of a decision management approach for banks and others facing an unknown but difficult regulatory environment in the next year or [...]

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Using decision management to surive an IT squeeze

November 7, 2008

An old friend sent me a link to an article on the Financial Times – How to survive an IT squeeze. I was struck by a couple of quotes:
Scarcity of capital will generate increased competition for the cash that is available. Consequently it will be even more important that businesses do everything they can to [...]

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Building Blocks of Decision Management

October 30, 2008

Michele Edelman of Discover presented on Building Blocks of Decision Management: “Tools to Rule”. Michele spends a lot of time educating people inside Discover and her team use sources like McKinsey to show executives why EDM matters. For instance, a report on top 10 macro-economic trends:

Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly not just globally [...]

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Live from the EDM Summit – From Here to Agility

October 28, 2008

I am at the EDM Summit this week and will be blogging live from some of the sessions and posting random thoughts and comments in addition. Despite the difficult market conditions, attendance looks good with a nice full room for the keynote and attendees from 17 countries. This year’s event also has a dozen new [...]

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Here’s how decision management delivers continuous strategy

October 14, 2008

An old colleague of mine, Vaughn Merlin, had a really interesting post this week When Strategy Becomes Continuous. It’s a great post and he makes three key points:

IT strategy is not the point – it’s all about business strategy.
Much ’strategy’ effort is not very strategic.
Strategy formulation and execution are too loosely coupled.

He then quotes [...]

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The Business Operations Platform

October 7, 2008

The folks from Cordys presented their view of the new business operations platform. Current systems development is in the context of four key game-changing trends:

Consumerization
Not just technology but can deliver business processes as services using the Internet
Commoditization
Virtualization
Not just of hardware but of processes and teams
Globalization

In this environment, processes are a key competitive advantage – much [...]

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Live from the SOA Symposium – Opening Keynotes

October 7, 2008

The SOA Symposium started today in the AJAX Stadium in Amsterdam. The opening keynotes were actually in the Stadium itself – we all sat at the halfway line. Thomas Erl and Sandy Carter gave quick intros and I will add some comments later but I could not type so this is just a placeholder have [...]

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The role of decision management in creating (and maintaining) a common vision

September 3, 2008

An interesting article on the role of the business analyst in creating a common vision caught my eye this morning. The article focused on creating a common vision but it made me think about maintaining and developing that common vision over time, particularly of the complex logic in a system. Procedural code does not lend [...]

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Here are some pressure points for business rules

August 15, 2008

Chris Berg wrote a nice piece on Pressure Points that seemed like it was worth highlighting. Chris outlines some great reasons for using business rules and he seems to Believe in business rules (as I do).

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Business Rules, Domain-Specific Languages and Models

August 12, 2008

I saw this piece on DSL and MDE, necessary assets for Model-Driven approaches and it made me think about DSLs. First, here’s the definition of a DSL from the article
DSL is a programming language or executable specification language that offers, through appropriate notations and abstractions, expressive power focused on, and usually restricted to, a particular [...]

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A reader asks… about development, business rules and model-driven development

August 4, 2008

I got an interesting series of questions from a reader that seemed to me to justify a longish post. The initial question was quite harmless looking:
Can you give a clue as to what software engineering approach you use/recommend for EDM, but especially business rules that non-IT staff can alter safely?
But the whole thing got more [...]

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Application Development 2.0

July 30, 2008

Ann All had a post on Agile development brings IT, business together that had the great phrase “application development 2.0″. In the article she mentioned some very worthy objectives for this 2.0 version of application development. Here they are, paraphrased slightly.

Encourage close collaboration between developers and end users
Involve users in quality assurance processes
Don’t use traditional [...]

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Here’s why to use decision management not just process management

June 30, 2008

I have often posted on the need to combine decision management and process management but it seemed to me that recently I have seen more BPM writers talking about this. For instance the folks over on the ARIS blog posted BPM + BRM = Greater than the Sum of the Parts (talking about a webinar [...]

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First Look – OutSystems Agile Platform

June 27, 2008

OutSystems came to my attention at the Forrester IT Forum as they were suggested as a tool with good support for what Forrester calls Dynamic Business Applications. Founded in 2001 they have 100+ customers mostly in Portugal and the Netherlands but increasingly also in the US. Of these they identify 17 existing customers that have [...]

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