change

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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Decision technology events for October 2011

May 23, 2011

There are a number of great events related to Decision Management themes and technology platforms this October. Here’s my list so far for October 2011

Teradata Partners Conference and Expo 2-6 October, San Diego, CA
This is a great conference for anyone using or considering Teradata. I assume that this year there will be a solid set [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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First Look – Sparkling Logic

April 27, 2011

Sparkling Logic is a new company founded by a couple of old colleagues of mine and focused on what they call “Social Logic”. They have developed a social, cloud-based environment designed to help companies find the best, most defined decision logic that launched today at the Gartner BPM Summit. Fundamentally the new platform aims to [...]

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Managing (and automating) scattered policies

April 21, 2011

Michael Rasmussen had a great post recently – Hordes of Policies Scattered Across the Organization – in which he had a great list of the challenges with risk management policies. Now Michael’s view of Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) is a little different than mine but he is spot on with this list of issues. [...]

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Increasing customer satisfaction in claims processing with rules and process

April 12, 2011

Final IBM IMPACT session for me this year is If P&C Insurance talking about the role of process and rules in claims processing. If is the largest property and casualty insurer in the Nordic region and covers all sorts of risks across personal and commercial lines of business. Insurance Customer Satisfaction can seem like an [...]

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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 [...]

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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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First Look Corticon 5

April 5, 2011

A long established vendor in the business rules management space, Corticon describe themselves as focused on delivering better, faster decisions by automating business rules. They have 450+ customers across insurance, financial services, government, health and ecommerce and say they have seen rapid growth in revenues in 2010 and into 2011. They have just announced Corticon [...]

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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 [...]

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Extracting logic from legal documents

March 23, 2011

The Rule Management Group presented next to the OMG meeting on Decision Model Notation. The Rule Management Group is a Dutch firm focused on how to extract business logic from various sources when building decisions – especially on how to extract logic from text documents. They typically work with legal documents and legal experts to [...]

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RuleGuide for managing decisions and rules

March 23, 2011

Lee Lambert of New Wisdom Software presented on his RuleGuide product (see my first look on RuleGuide) to the group considering a Decision Modeling Notation for the Object Management Group. Lee initially focused on the typical complexity that comes when working with Business Process Management and Business Rules Management. Most projects started with a large [...]

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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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Decision Management and Insurance – Rethink Legacy and Fast Path New Product Development

February 17, 2011

Insurers face huge challenges with their installed base of legacy mainframe applications.  Many systems are 15-20 years old and are impeding insurers’ ability to respond to the market demands for new products and to the increased rate of consumerization. Maintenance costs are high and staffing challenges continue to mount.
Growing consumer buying power will force property [...]

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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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Webinar: Smarter ERP with Decision Management

February 2, 2011

Large companies rely on their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and other enterprise applications to manufacture, distribute and manage the products their customers need. The behavior of these operational systems is critical to how a company treats, and is perceived by, its customers, its partners and its suppliers. Yet these systems [...]

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Business rules, accelerating change and Decision Management

January 4, 2011

Randy Heffner had a post late last year that I just got to – Business 2011 Gets Faster; Business Rules And SOA Policy Get More Important. Randy makes the key point that while the pace of change means you cannot afford to lock up your business logic in traditional code, you also can’t just let [...]

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Unum – Managing business rules #bbc2010

October 19, 2010

Subtitled “from 0 to 1400″, this case study discussed how Unum (an insurance company) introduced business rules. Back in 2009 their rules were scattered, siloed, hidden in requirements documents and in different formats (from code to if/then statements to long verbose notes). And even though they tried to focus on rules, [...]

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