Business

Identifying your company’s hidden potential

April 5, 2011

Paul Nunes of Accenture presented some of his work at the Accenture Institute for High Performance. He began with a story – Zenith. Zenith did well in radios, got into television and rode that curve and as competition grew more intense they got into PCs and computers. But they sold off the computer business rather [...]

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The goal of a Decision Model and Notation Standard

March 29, 2011

Last week I posted from an Object Management Group standards meeting on efforts to develop a Decision Model and Notation standard. You can see my kick-off presentation and the table of contents in the first post of the sequence – OMG Decision Model Notation – Importance of Decisions. In response to this sequence one of [...]

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The New Quantitative Era: Creating Successful Business Change with Analytics

March 15, 2011

Tom Davenport kicked off the second day of Predictive Analytics World with a keynote on the new era of quantitative, or data-driven business. Various analytic threads – web analytics, HR analytics, actuarial, predictive marketing and supply chain – are coming together in really what is best described as Enterprise analytics. The world is changing and [...]

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SAP Run Better Tour – Geoffrey Moore

February 23, 2011

After yesterday’s sneak peak the BI 4 launch event – the “Run Better Tour” – kicked off this morning with the main tent event. Geoffrey Moore focused on changes in enterprise IT – specifically the move from what he calls systems of record to “systems of engagement” driven by the consumerization of IT. Enterprise IT [...]

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Decision Management and Insurance – A Series

February 10, 2011

Insurers face new and growing challenges as the market moves into recovery in 2011: more delivery channels, demographic shifts, a changing competitive landscape and a rapidly evolving regulatory and compliance environment. Many insurers are faced with meeting this challenges hampered by inflexible legacy applications, underutilized data from internal systems and external sources, and manual spreadsheets [...]

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Here’s why you should refuse requests for reports!

November 9, 2010

One of my favorite web analytics bloggers, Avinash Kaushik at Occam’s Razor had a great post recently – Rebel! Refuse Report Requests. Only Answer Business Questions, FTW. In this post he argues that web analytics professionals should refuse requests for reports like

How much traffic is coming to our website?
I want a conversion rate
I want a [...]

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The three legged stool – business, analytics, IT

November 2, 2010

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
I was inspired to write something this week on the need to get people to collaborate by a post Jim Harris wrote called The Business versus IT—Tear down this wall! and the response Gary Cokins made in That Wall Dividing IT and Users. Both Jim and Gary [...]

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Speaking at IBM Business Analytics Forum 2010

October 12, 2010

[ October 27, 2010; 11:30 am to 1:00 pm. ] I am going to be speaking at IBM’s Information on Demand/Business Analytics Forum in Las Vegas. I will be on stage with Deepak Advani, who heads up the SPSS business analytics business, during the SPSS keynote on Wednesday. The keynote will focus on predictive analytics and on Decision Management – both the approach and the [...]

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Fall webinar series announced

August 30, 2010

I just scheduled and announced four new webinars for this fall:

Simplifying over-complex processes
Delivering customer centricity across multiple channels, multiple platforms
Implementing analytics? You need business rules
Decision analytics – more than BI and web analytics

You can find all my upcoming events in the Events Calendar.

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Webinar – Delivering customer centricity across multiple channels, multiple platforms

August 30, 2010

Organizations have multiple channels for interacting with their customers. Each channel has its own platform for valid technical reasons. And each line of business has its own systems while customer data is spread across multiple databases. To deliver customer centricity, organizations need to connect these elements effectively. At the heart of effective customer interactions are [...]

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Webinar on business rules governance

August 19, 2010

My friends at DAASL are hosting a webinar on How to achieve Rule Governance and the associated Best Practices for Enterprise wide adoption of Business Rules Management Systems. To register for the webinar go to http://daaslinc.net/webinar.php?id=Webinar1
The webinar is on 26th August 2010 at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern. Chaitanya Kumar Sharma will speak and cover:

Introduction to BRMS
Why [...]

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Webinar with Progress on decisions and responsiveness

July 21, 2010

I am giving a webinar on “Building Responsive Enterprises – One Decision at a Time” with Progress Software this week. I will discuss how decision management improves business performance by identifying the key decisions that drive value in your business. I will discuss:

The responsive enterprise
The need for decisions
Business rules and business [...]

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First Look – Verix

May 14, 2010

I got my first look at Verix recently. Verix targets the commercial side of Pharmaceutical companies – sales first, then managed care and then marketing. They are trying to shift the burden of analysis work from sales managers, sales consultants to automated systems. They started with a core analytic competency and it evolved over time [...]

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Decision engines in financial services

April 26, 2010

This is a piece I wrote for Chris Pratt’s quarterly financial institutions newsletter
The use of technology to automate and manage decisions, especially high volume decisions essential to day-to-day operational execution, is expanding rapidly. Beginning with the consumer credit business, use of decision engines and decision management has spread to all aspects of financial services [...]

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Paying for rules by the rule with IDIOM

April 20, 2010

I have blogged about the folks at IDIOM before and I recently heard that they are making IDIOM Decision Manager available under a new free/very low cost price plan. Not a trial or test plan, but a real pricing model that supports commercial development and full ownership of generated code at what can only be [...]

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What exactly does real-time sense-making mean

April 13, 2010

Jeff Jonas of IBM had a great post on Some Organizations Will Be Smarter-er Than Others recently in which he discussed his “obsession with real-time sensemaking systems”.
Now I like the phrase and, in the context of real-life, it is clear what it means. But for a business, what does it mean?
Well sometimes it means [...]

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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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Business rules, decision making and IT

March 30, 2010

When I blogged about Jim Sinur’s session “Business rules are king” at the Gartner BPM Summit I provoked a very thoughtful response from Tom Graves – On business rules. While Tom strongly agreed with the basic implication that organizations need discipline around business rules he identified three concerns, all of which seem to me to [...]

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More on replacing COBOL with something useful

February 10, 2010

Lisa posted an interesting comment on an old post of mine (Why don’t you replace COBOL with something useful (not Java)) in which she make some interesting comments:
I understand your last point that using a declarative “model” such business rules would be preferable to replace legacy COBOL applications instead of using a procedural language.
Indeed. [...]

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Is your legacy modernization program just “forward to the 70s”?

February 4, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ

Phil Murphey, over at Forrester, had a post on  Apps Modernization – What are Your Top Priorities in 2010/11? that reminded me I wanted to write about modernization a little before the year got too far advanced. As Phil says the coming years are going to be really interesting:
Leading edge technologies will become [...]

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