business process

New White Paper: Decisions at the Heart of Your Processes

May 2, 2011

A new white paper is up on Decision Management Solutions company site, “The Decisions at the Heart of Your Processes - How Decision Management simplifies business processes and improves results.” It is a companion paper to the workshop I gave last week at Gartner BPM 2011.
Summary: Companies applying Business Process Management can create simpler and more [...]

Read the full article →

Role of Business Intelligence in process improvement

April 29, 2011

Bill Gassman spoke on the role of Business Intelligence – BI – in process improvement. Bill means “big BI” – everything to do with intelligence about your business, the discipline of BI and analytics, not just a “BI” product. The road to intelligent operations he says has “haves” and “have nots” – some have BI [...]

Read the full article →

The BPM Scenario

April 29, 2011

Janelle Hill talked about the BPM Scenario and the role of BPM in creating intelligent operations. She had three things to cover – why is BPM more important than ever, business optimization and where to go next.
First, she reminded us of some key elements of BPM from Gartner’s perspective:

BPM involves a focus on processes as [...]

Read the full article →

Rapid Fire Business Rules at Gartner BPM

April 28, 2011

Roy Schulte of Gartner gave a rapid fire session on business rules. Business rules he says can be used in multiple ways in a Business Process Management context. It can be used to make applications smarter and more flexible by externalizing rules. You can also use them to control process flow. And you can use [...]

Read the full article →

10 Questions to Ask about your Business Rules Project

April 27, 2011

Here are 10 questions to ask about your business rules project that I developed some time ago but never ran on the blog – enjoy.

What is the business decision at the heart of your project?

How often is it made? What triggers it? Who makes it today? How repeatable is it?

Is this [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – Information Builders

April 25, 2011

I recently got a briefing from Information Builders, an independent business intelligence (BI) and enterprise information integration/management (EIM) vendor founded in 1975. They sell their BI and EIM solutions separately, though they are increasingly selling these solutions together. They have 1,350 employees and 12,000 customer sites as well as a strong OEM portfolio. They find [...]

Read the full article →

Webinar: Increasing BPM agility and effectiveness with Decision Management

April 22, 2011

[ May 5, 2011; 10:00 am to 11:00 am. ] On May 5th at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern I am giving a free webinar on “Increasing BPM agility and effectiveness with Decision Management”. Combining BPM with Decision Management results in simpler, more agile processes and increases straight through processing and operational effectiveness. Decision Management delivers a shared  framework for cross-functional business and IT collaboration creating game-changing [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – G Stat

April 21, 2011

G-Stat is a privately held Israeli company focused on advanced analytical and data mining solutions. The founder of G-Stat began his career as an econometrician, focusing on large time-series data initially. Then he worked at the Bank of Israel in IT helping translate what the economists and others needed into information systems. He rapidly became [...]

Read the full article →

Some closing thoughts on IBM IMPACT 2011

April 13, 2011

I am back home after a couple of days at IBM IMPACT 2011 in Las Vegas and as promised here are a couple of closing thoughts.

Decision Management has gone mainstream
IBM put Decision Management front and center alongside Business Process Management. For someone like me who has been writing and talking about Decision Management for 9 [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – Activant DynaChange rules

April 13, 2011

I saw an interesting press announcement the other day about Activant’s new business rules functionality. Activant (who recently agreed to be acquired and merged with Epicor) is an ERP provider focused on distribution and retail – 60% of revenues come from retail and 40% from distribution. Activant as a whole has 15,000 customers concentrated in [...]

Read the full article →

WebSphere Process Server and JRules United

April 12, 2011

Westenrot and Wurttembergbische AG is a German financial services company covering insurance, home loans and savings. W&W had a set of business processes for order processing across all the products sold by the bank. These processes validated, completed and stored the order data and then generate a PDF to send to the customer/archive and update [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

IBM Business Process Manager 7.5

April 12, 2011

The new Business Process Manager 7.5 brings together the WebSphere Lombardi Edition and WebSphere Process Server in a single go-forward product. IBM wanted to bring the power of the WPS runtime and the simplicity of the Lombardi platform while significantly improving design time governance and end to end  visibility. The new product has:

Process Server
The evolution [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

IBM WebSphere update

April 11, 2011

Helping clients transform their business is the theme. In the rapidly changing world, transformation is not optional and it doesn’t come easy. IBM talks about a “culture of adaptability” and about complex business ecosystems that pull together capabilities from multiple companies as part of delivering new products and services. IBM’s recent focus has been on [...]

Read the full article →

Separation of concerns and the Service-Oriented Business Process

April 11, 2011

Nicklas Holmberg from the Lund School of Economics and Management in Sweden presented on the importance of separation of concerns in business process design. His work has been in healthcare, particularly around a system for vaccination management, and is focused on business rules and a business rules-centric approach to designing services and processes.
Nicklas began by [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

The 3 B’s: Business Process, Business Rules and Business Intelligence

April 11, 2011

This post originally appeared as an article in my company‘s newsletter Decision Management News (sign up here).
Business Process, Business Rules, Business Intelligence – the three “B’s” that drive much of today’s IT investment. Often considered separate domains and separate sets of technologies, each B has its own center of excellence, its own methodology, its own [...]

Read the full article →

Discussing a proposal for a decision modeling notation

March 23, 2011

Warning –this is a post about a standards process so there are a fair number of abbreviations – I tried to describe the key ones.
There is a large community of users of business rules management systems, with thousands of large companies using them to automate and improve decisions. In addition, there is a strong sense [...]

Read the full article →

CEP and Decision Management

March 23, 2011

Paul Vincent of Tibco presented to the OMG Decision Modeling Notation day on the impact of event processing and real-time event handling on decision management. In particular the increasing need for true real-time, almost snap decisions. Tibco sees demand for these kinds of decisions across banking and trading, supply chains, telecommunications and more. Paul used [...]

Read the full article →