champion/challenger

First Look – Zoot

February 9, 2012

Zoot was founded in 1990 and has been providing hosted decision management solutions since 1992. With a focus on financial services, Zoot’s clients include 3 of the top 5 U.S. banks and they work with clients of all sizes and across all lines of business.  Instant credit decisioning is one of their critical offerings, but [...]

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First Look – IBM’s Next Step in Decision Management

October 6, 2011

IBM is announcing a new product and product positioning today. With the tag line “Turning Automated Decision Management into Real-time Operational Advantage” they have announced WebSphere Operational Decision Management.
This new product is an evolution of the market-leading business rules management system, WebSphere ILOG JRules BRMS, united with IBM’s WebSphere Business Events. It brings business rules [...]

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First Look SAS Model Manager 3.1

September 22, 2011

SAS 9.3 shipped a couple of months ago and it included an update of SAS Model Manager 3.1. Model Manager (reviewed here) is a product for managing the analytic model lifecycle once a model is built – validating, deploying, monitoring and retraining predictive analytic models. Model Manager is designed to help with some of the [...]

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Webinar: How to build Decision Management Systems – Part 3 Decision Analysis

August 23, 2011

[ November 29, 2011; 10:00 am to 11:00 am. ] Decision Management Systems are the next generation of information systems. Agile, analytic and adaptive, Decision Management Systems put business rules management systems, predictive analytics and optimization to work improving the effectiveness and efficiency of your operations. Decision Management Systems are agile – easy to change, easy to keep compliant and transparent in their behavior. They [...]

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Webinar Series: How to build Decision Management Systems

August 23, 2011

I will be hosting a three part free webinar series How to Build Decision Management Systems this Fall.
Decision Management Systems are the next generation of information systems. Agile, analytic and adaptive, Decision Management Systems put business rules management systems, predictive analytics and optimization to work improving the effectiveness and efficiency of your operations. Decision Management [...]

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Decision Management’s “Epsom Salt” problem

July 7, 2011

Have you looked at a packet of Epsom Salt recently? Here’s a product that describes itself as

a soaking aid for minor sprains and bruises
a saline laxative for the short term relief of constipation
a plant nutrient for vigorous lawns, flowers, plants, vegetables and trees

Three very different uses – after all, how many laxatives would you put [...]

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Update – In2Clouds

May 16, 2011

I got an update from in2clouds recently. Since I last wrote about them (see this First Look on in2clouds) they have made 3 key updates – they have added support for ensemble models, moved to allow private/hybrid cloud deployment and completed their service definition API.
Ensemble models first. While using an ensemble model does not always [...]

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Decision Management, Big Data and McKinsey

May 13, 2011

Cross posted at International Institute for Analytics
McKinsey just published a new study “Big Data: the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity” that is definitely worth reading. With lots of detail – it runs to more than 150 pages – it discusses why there is so much more data, what that means and how this [...]

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Decision Services need more than rules – #rulesfest

October 12, 2010

I just completed my presentation at RulesFest so here are the key points.
For the RulesFest audience I assumed that either they were already using business rules or at least that they plan to be, and that  they knew what a rule engine is and how it works. Before going on to my five points, let [...]

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First Look – in2clouds

September 29, 2010

in2clouds is focused on helping companies use Predictive Analytics to improve their business performance. Founded by MicroStrategy alumni and launched in 2009, in2clouds is a small company that has been working in hi-tech, financial services and retail. Seeing analytics as “the next big thing” they want to reduce the friction for mainstream adoption and help [...]

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Update – SAS Model Manager

August 18, 2010

I got an update from SAS on SAS Model Manager recently. The new release came out August 17 alongside a new release of SAS Enterprise Miner and has some interesting new features. SAS Model Manager, as I noted in my previous review, supports the analytic model deployment lifecycle (from registering candidate models through validation, deployment, [...]

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On the importance of experimentation

August 4, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
The McKinsey Quarterly had an article today on Ten Tech-enabled business trends to watch and number 5 caught my eye -Experimentation and big data. As the authors say
What if you could analyze every transaction, capture insights from every customer interaction, and didn’t have to wait for months to get data from [...]

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First Look – IBM/SPSS Decision Management and Modeler

May 19, 2010

I received an update from IBM recently on IBM SPSS Decision Management 6 and IBM SPSS Modeler 14. IBM  sees organizations with many different data sources (inside and outside) that are moving from a traditional approach focused on reporting to one that involves “predict and act” – real-time, fact-driven decision making at the point of [...]

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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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Silverlink update

April 21, 2010

I did some work with Silverlink some time ago and was really impressed by their use of decision management to improve the communication of health plans and others in the healthcare space with members and patients. I got a chance to catch up with them recently to discuss progress and their use of adaptive control [...]

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First Look – GDS Link

March 25, 2010

I got an update from GDS Link recently, a risk management solutions company focused on data access, decisioning and model implementation. Launched in 2006 by folks former Experian – Scorex management, the company’s core product is Dataview360 (launched in 2007). They have 23 customers worldwide.
As I have noted before, a common problem in financial services [...]

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First Look – FICO Xpress and Business Rules

February 17, 2010

Optimization is a mathematical process for finding the best decision for a given business problem – usually highest profit, lowest cost given a set of constraints. Involve applying an algorithm to data, decision variables, constraints and an objective function. In financial services and insurance optimization is still fairly new (unlike, say, supply chain) but the [...]

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First Look – TRIAD 8.5 and Decision Graph

February 15, 2010

TRIAD 8.5 has just been released and is the latest version of FICO’s combined account manager and customer manager platform for financial services companies (its focus is on accounts/customers where credit risk is a critical issue). I got an update recently focused on Decision Graph. Decision Graph is  one of the new capabilities. Decision Graph [...]

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First Look – SAS Enterprise Miner/Model Manager

December 3, 2009

The folks from SAS gave me a quick update the other day on SAS Enterprise Miner and SAS Model Manager, two of SAS’ data mining/predictive analytics products. I often blog about SAS, as you would expect, but I have not done any product posts. SAS’ Business Analytics Framework is focused on helping organizations find the [...]

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Business Rules Forum 2009 – Day 1 #brf

November 4, 2009

It’s the end of day 1 of the Business Rules Forum/Enterprise Decision Management Summit and time to write a wrap up post for the day – no live blogging today as I have too much on as track chair to sit behind my keyboard!
Today I got to attend Jim Sinur’s keynote and sessions from Roger [...]

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