Business Agility

Live from IMPACT – Business Event Processing

April 8, 2008

Ed Lynch, from the AptSoft acquisition, was on next for me talking about using Business Event Processing for an agile business response. This was interesting given IBM’s recent announcements on business event processing.
Charles Brett from Forrester began with an overview of Event Processing. Charles, like many, assumed that event processing was a narrowly focused approach [...]

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Live from IMPACT – Customer Panel on Driving Alignment

April 8, 2008

After the keynote it is back to the other end of the MGM Grand to attend a customer panel on business/IT alignment. Amy Wohl is the host and she blogs here. BTW I may not finish the whole session as I have to go sign the book at the bookstore at the show. I am [...]

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Live from IMPACT – Evening Activities

April 7, 2008

Evening of Monday night and its party time in the solutions area of IMPACT. Once again the wonderful string quartet were strutting their electric stuff and the food and drinks were good. I spent my time speaking to the few folks present who were really interested in decisioning (Chordiant, ILOG, select IBMers) and then went [...]

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Blogging Live from IMPACT – Opening Keynotes Part I

April 7, 2008

I am attending the IBM IMPACT show today and tomorrow and will try and blog live from the show. So far the wireless isn’t working in the keynote location (I am on my broadband wireless modem, thank you Verizon) and the room has no tables and no power for the HUGE number of laptop users [...]

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What IS a smart (enough) system anyway?

March 27, 2008

I am often asked the question in the title – what is a smart (enough) system? Here’s the list we use when we talk about it:

Operational
While one can make systems of all kinds “smarter” we are talking about making operational, transactional, high-volume, typically customer facing applications smart enough to be useful.
Real-Time
As a result we talk [...]

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Drools, Java code, business rules and decision automation

March 24, 2008

The nice folks on the Drools blog pointed me to an article today called Implement business logic with the Drools rules engine. This article was written by Ricardo Olivieri of IBM. Richard does a nice job of walking through both the basic case for using a business rules engine (BRE). I feel compelled to make [...]

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Book Review – The IT Value Stack

March 21, 2008

The IT Value Stack: A Boardroom Guide to IT LeadershipI recently finished Ade McCormack’s book, The IT Value Stack: A Boardroom Guide to IT Leadership. The book is aimed at a fairly high-level audience and makes a case for better integration, or “entwinement”, of technology into businesses. Ade can come across somewhat opinionated but he [...]

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Here’s how EDM addresses a gap in Model Driven Engineering

March 14, 2008

I was reading Johan den Haan’s really good article on Model Driven Engineering or MDE today and a particular comment caught my eye:
MDE aims to increase the return a company derives from its software development effort.
He went on to quote Atkinson & Kühne for two ways to do this:

By improving the short-term productivity of [...]

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SOA and BPM with IDC

March 11, 2008

Second session at IDC Directions today and I am listening to Maureen Fleming and Sandy Rogers talking about SOA and BPM. IDC takes the position that this is about a need for agile systems and that BPM and SOA are part of how organizations can address this need. Of course, having just come from a [...]

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Call for presentations – the new EDM Summit

March 11, 2008

How are you integrating business rules and analytics?
How are you adding intelligence to your business processes?
How are you putting analytics to work in your operational systems?
How, in other words, are you using Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) to innovate your business? Your colleagues and peers want to know.

We invite you to present [...]

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Live from DIALOG – Agile Tax Management Using Rules and BPM

February 25, 2008

I missed a session from longtime ILOG customer eBay but then I attended one on Agile Tax Management Using Rules and BPM by the Tax Administration Service of Mexico and EMC. The project being discussed was very successful, they say, and based on a combination of EMC’s BPM tool (Documentum) and ILOG’s rules.
SAT, the tax [...]

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Live from DIALOG – Making Change Work to Your Advantage

February 25, 2008

After a fascinating lunch with Sandy Carter (of which more later), Steve Demuth gave the BRMS track keynote – Make Change Work to Your Advantage. Steve’s focus is on the potential competitive advantage of rules. Automate decisions, he said, are everywhere – with which I would completely agree – especially if you correctly consider micro [...]

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Live from DIALOG – Sandy Carter on SOA and Web 2.0

February 25, 2008

After a short break we had Sandy Carter on The New Language of Business – SOA and Web 2.0. Sandy has recently published a book on this topic(The New Language of Business: SOA & Web 2.0). IBM recently surveyed CEOs to see what is top of mind and found that innovation for growth in today’s [...]

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Live from DIALOG – Scott Klososky Keynote: Do You Have Velocity Leadership?

February 25, 2008

Next up was Scott Klososky on Do You Have Velocity Leadership? Scott talks to organizations about how technology impacts different businesses and has a book coming out soon (though I could not find a link for it). He uses a quote to show his attitude to technology:
A rock pile ceases to be a [...]

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Live from DIALOG – Best Practices in Rule Governance

February 24, 2008

Well here I am at DIALOG 08, ILOG’s user group. The show passes the “Kemsley” test because there is wireless Internet access throughout the event, enabling me to blog live. First session was from Pierre Berlandier of ILOG talking about business rules governance. The session was packed – despite the option of playing golf instead [...]

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RAD with rules

February 22, 2008

I saw this post on Better Projects and it reminded me of days spent writing a RAD methodology for Ernst and Young. RAD, or Rapid Application Development, uses prototyping and lots of short iterations to keep a development project on track. The post has a nice graphic showing the cycles within cycles used in the [...]

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How to prioritize the use of EDM in a recession

February 8, 2008

Last post in my series today – how to prioritize your use of EDM in a recession. As with any effort to prioritize EDM, the first thing to do is identify the decisions that make the difference. This means finding the micro decisions that are often hidden in your processes as well as correctly identifying [...]

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Reducing fixed IT costs with EDM

February 7, 2008

This second to last post in the series is focused on the specific ability of Enterprise Decision Management or EDM to reduce fixed IT costs. This comes in two main “flavors” – using EDM to reduce maintenance costs through legacy modernization and using EDM to reduce the risks and costs of outsourcing. Both legacy modernization [...]

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Using EDM and adaptive control to respond to uncertainty

February 6, 2008

In a recession, perhaps even more than in other business climates, companies face a high degree of uncertainty. How will markets and consumers react to each new piece of news? How desperate will competitors get? Which products and services will be regarded by customers as necessities even in hard times and which will be jettisoned [...]

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What needs more agility – processes or decisions?

January 30, 2008

Kjell-Sverre Jerijærvi posted A SOA+BPM+CDM Ontology with a very nice graphic showing his point of view when it comes to the various aspects of Business Process Management (BPM), SOA and Event-Driven Architecture(EDA). Given his model, which I liked, Decision Services (wiki) are going to be in the Activity layer – not part of Entity Services [...]

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