business rules engine

Business Rules, Free Trials and ILOG

July 1, 2008

I am a firm believer in getting the technology for decision management into the hands of those who might use it – I often feel that people just don’t understand what’s possible. The folks over at ILOG have been offering a 6 month JRules trial since last fall. This full version has everything but the [...]

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Live from InterACT – An Enterprise Decision Engine for Originations

April 30, 2008

Wednesday begins with Antonio Paulo Conde from Citibank Brazil talking about an enterprise decision engine for originations in their retail bank.   Measuring and understanding the risk of new financial products is important and became more so as the sales teams gained more negotiation power. To address this Citibank used Blaze Advisor to build an [...]

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Live from InterACT – New Approaches to Strategies

April 28, 2008

Next up was Stuart Crawford, part of Fair Isaac’s extensive research staff, on new approaches to the creation, visualization and comparison of decision trees or, as Fair Isaac calls them, Strategies. Stuart has been working at Fair Isaac for many years and has a lot of background in analytics. This work is about how to [...]

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First Look – InRule Technology

April 21, 2008

A couple of weeks ago I got an update from the folks at InRule. InRule was founded in 2002 in Chicago and has 100+ customers. Their focus, like most business rules vendors, is on dynamic decisioning and process agility. They estimate that nearly half their prospective customers are also doing BPM not just rules. InRule [...]

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Live from IMPACT – End to End Process Visibility

April 8, 2008

Last session for me today, indeed the last session before I go home, is Janelle Hill of Gartner and Kramer Reeves of IBM on improving agility through end-to-end process agility. Janelle went first sharing Gartner’s BPM Scenario for the next five years. She had two initial points:

In 2013, do you know where your work is?
How [...]

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Wonderful example of rule harvesting

March 31, 2008

Paul Haley has done an amazingly thorough job walking through a business rule harvesting example over on his blog. If this is
something you either do for a living or are considering, read the post. Where Paul finds the time to write such long, detailed posts I will never know….

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First Look – Zementis ADAPA

March 25, 2008

A little while ago I got to talk to Mike Zeller and his team at Zementis about their decision management platform – ADAPA, what they call a predictive analytics decision engine. ADAPA stands for Adaptive Decision And Predictive Analytics.
The folks at Zementis started trying to solve a fairly common problem in organizations adopting data mining [...]

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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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Live from DAMA – A Reference Architecture for Integrating an Active Data Warehouse into the Real-Time Enterprise

March 18, 2008

Stephen Brobst of Teradata was next with A Reference Architecture for Integrating an Active Data Warehouse into the Real-Time Enterprise. He started with a great quote from a Gartner analyst:
No such thing as a business surprise – there is always a warning in advance
but were you listening – did you collect data about it, analyze [...]

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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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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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A chance to get the book (and see me) at ILOG’s Dialog 08

January 28, 2008

Next month (February 24th – 26th), I am going to be attending ILOG’s user conference:

I will be introducing and acting as host for a couple of sessions on best practices and giving a lunch and learn on Tuesday. I will be there the whole time, blogging from the BRMS track so look me up if [...]

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More thoughts on RuleBurst and Haley

November 28, 2007

Having posted some initial thoughts on RuleBurst’s acquisition of Haley, I was lucky enough to get some time with Peter Still, VP Strategy. Peter and I spent an interesting hour discussing the merger and the combined companies plans so I thought I would share some of my thoughts.
The first interesting thing to note is that, [...]

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Please don’t just “unify” rules and process

November 19, 2007

Mark Proctor, he of Drools fame, posted today on his vision for unifying rules and processes. Not content with describing me as “large” and “infamous” in a previous post, now he has to get my blood pressure up with this new post! Seriously, though, I am going to disagree with Mark’s basic premise.
For starters, the [...]

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A critical mass in natural-language rules?

November 14, 2007

Heard the news today that RuleBurst (an Australian BRMS vendor) has acquired Haley Systems (a US one). The press release makes a big point of the two companies shared focus on natural language rules and of their contrasting historical markets (Asia/Pacific and Europe v US).
I don’t have any more details beyond the publicly announced ones, [...]

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Live from Business Rules Forum (almost) – Vendor Panel

October 26, 2007

One of the interesting panels was the one that Steve Hendrick of IDC hosted where representatives of many of the big players in business rules took questions. I did not attempt to take detailed notes but here are some of the things that struck me:

All the vendors are very focused on providing more tools to [...]

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