Posts tagged as:

Business

Marketing and Customer Segmentation with Xeno

September 22, 2008

Delivering the best value proposition using segmentation is a multi-step journey with 6 main steps and some critical differences from other analytic approaches:

Define Segmentation Objectives
The first step – deciding why to build a segmentation scheme – is important but often overlooked. Reasons may include declining financial performance, changes in strategy or market trends – the [...]

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First Look – Erudine Behaviour Engine

September 15, 2008

Erudine is a British company a few years old and has released some new technology in a new process context – the Erudine Behaviour Engine (yes, the British spelling). Like many technologies, Erudine is targeting the business-IT divide, focusing on problems like those of translating requirements into systems, integrating the expertise of lots of people [...]

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Predictive Marketing (Lessons from the CMO Summit #3)

September 9, 2008

Stephan Chase of Marriott generated the third set of thoughts. He is working to make Marriott more customer-centric, in particular by employing predictive modeling to determine what customers are likely to do in the future while using results in marketing to create a learning organization. This is of course the heart and soul of decision [...]

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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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A reader asks – what makes a company ready (for EDM)?

August 27, 2008

A reader had an interesting question this week. As a comment to Using decision management to deliver intelligent business performance he asked “What makes a company ready?”. I suspect my closing line “The products are, mostly, ready. Whether companies are is another question…” prompted this.
So, what makes a company ready for enterprise decision management – [...]

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SOA Survey for you

August 25, 2008

A student of Information Systems for Business Performance at University College Cork, Ireland is  investigating how SOA can influence the IT capability of a firm and to what extent this strategy can become a major initiative for changing the underlying business approach of an organization. I offered to post the survey which should take no [...]

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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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Using decision management to deliver intelligent business performance

August 5, 2008

Steve Cranford of PwC wrote an interesting piece called Bringing Order to Chaos (brought to my attention by Alan over at Tibco) that made me think. Steve’s focus is on the next software suite for enterprises (something he calls an Intelligent Business Performance Platform) consisting of business intelligence, business process and business rules. Reading this [...]

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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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Believe in business rules (I do)

August 1, 2008

Earlier this week I posted Application Development 2.0 in which I addressed what I see as some of the issues with current development practices and tried to explain why I think a declarative, business rules approach is essential. This (and some blog posts around the blogosphere) made me think about the mismatch I see when [...]

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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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Enterprise Decision Management and the Software Development Lifecycle

July 14, 2008

One of my regular readers had a question today about Enterprise Decision Management and the Software Development Lifecycle – the EDMSDLC if you like. Here’s what he asked:
We do Business Rules in our approach… I guess one question would be, where does EDM fit in a typical SDLC? [company] does Requirements, we have a method [...]

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First Look – Corticon

June 30, 2008

I got a walkthrough of Corticon’s Business Rules product last week – the first time I have discussed it in a while. Version 5 has some interesting features. The Business Rules Foundation is a set of headless services, designed to support a variety of development tools, UI frameworks and metaphors along with a variety of [...]

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Business Process – Linking Business and IT

June 18, 2008

Janelle Hill of Gartner kicked off day 2. Business Process Management is the current approach to being process-centric and part of a long history stretching back to Taylor/Deming, Business Process Reengineering and more. In particular it is an evolution from computerized process flow, to packaged applications as best practices and now flexible and adaptive processes. [...]

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Business-Empowered Process Implementation

June 17, 2008

Bruce Silver led a panel on business-empowerment and BPMN. He emphasized that BPM is an approach, BPMS is a software stack for supporting this new approach AND that there is change in how business and IT work together. Business-empowered implementation is what he uses to describe this – no break between the business view [...]

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Coghead and Intalio

June 17, 2008

Greg Olsen from Coghead presented how they are using Intalio’s BPMS. Greg is a believer in “small BPM” – something to extend and enhance something else. Greg’s experience led him to conclude that some basic database/process capabilities could be very useful to non-developers. Coghead was a platform as a service play from the beginning and [...]

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When is a cockpit not a cockpit?

May 30, 2008

When it’s a dashboard.
I often hear people talk about fighter pilots as a model for the future of business users. For instance, Ade McCormack did in his book on the IT value stack. Indeed this is such a good mental image that many companies use it – either to promote their products or to talk [...]

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Change management in the real world using BPM

May 23, 2008

Colin Tuebner wrapped up with a session on BPM and change management. The presentation is based on a set of interviews with those customers using BPM a while and doing a good job at managing process change. The theme is “Organizations use different patterns for controlling change; choose yours and don’t let change manage you.” [...]

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Lessons Learned from BPM Deployments

May 23, 2008

Ken Vollmer kicked off the last day of the event with a view from the field – a survey on BPM that Forrester did at the end of 2007. The theme is that “BPM has already achieved mainstream status inside of most enterprises but we still have a long way to go to achieve the [...]

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