decision automation

How to address decision making challenges – Peer Pressure

June 23, 2008

This week I thought I would write some posts about how enterprise decision management can help address some of the very real challenges in decision making. First up is peer pressure. A friend sent me this article from the Sloan Review – Applying (and Resisting) Peer Influence -and a couple of key concepts are clear [...]

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Automating Decisions within Business Processes

May 21, 2008

I can’t blog this session live as John Rymer and Mike Gualtieri have asked me to participate. What follows is a combination of thoughts based on the presentation and post-presentation notes.
The theme of the presentation is that “The next frontier in business process management (BPM) and business rules is automating decisions within business processes”. If [...]

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First Look – ThinkAnalytics

March 31, 2008

I spent some time with Peter Docherty of ThinkAnalytics recently, talking about their decisioning product. ThinkAnalytics grew out of K.wiz, a small team focused on the automation of the data mining process. The team had experience in data mining, real-time telecoms monitoring and data compression. They delivered an open, component-based platform with the intent to [...]

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Want EDM Success? How about a recipe for that?

March 28, 2008

Mike Kavitz had a great post on his blog today Want SOA Success? Try this Recipe. I really liked the article, not least because it was clearly based on hard-won experience on Mike’s part. Reading it I saw how similar an Enterprise Decision Management or EDM success recipe would be.

Research the living daylights out [...]

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First Look – Chordiant Decision Management

March 27, 2008

I had a chance to talk with Rob Walker last week about Chordiant and their decision management platform. Chordiant focuses on large customers – those with lots of decisions in markets such as retail banking, consumer lending, card services, insurance and communications. Their mantra is Customer Experience Management and they aim to deliver an improvement [...]

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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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SAS improves its support for EDM

March 17, 2008

Some interesting news from SAS today that, to me at least, boosts their support of enterprise decision management or EDM. First they announced a specific product bundle from their work with Teradata – you can get details here. This integrates SAS Enterprise Miner, their predictive analytics/data mining workbench, with Teradata’s database allowing for models developed [...]

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SOA and BPM with IDC

March 11, 2008

Second session at IDC Directions today and I am listening to Maureen Fleming and Sandy Rogers talking about SOA and BPM. IDC takes the position that this is about a need for agile systems and that BPM and SOA are part of how organizations can address this need. Of course, having just come from a [...]

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Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Reality Check with IDC

March 11, 2008

I dropped by the IDC Directions event today and saw two presentations. First up was Kathy Wilhide talking about Governance, Risk and Compliance or GRC as it is known. The GRC market has grown from a need for higher levels of confidence in financial and operational information. As compliance is not built into most existing [...]

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CIOs – use EDM to deliver what your business managers want

March 11, 2008

Frank Gens of IDC posted this short item on what Line of Business managers want from their CIOs and it had a nice little graph showing the key things that the business wants from IT. Of the 10 items, several seem to me to show the need for Enterprise Decision Management or EDM:

Speed up project [...]

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Live from DIALOG – Making Change Work to Your Advantage

February 25, 2008

After a fascinating lunch with Sandy Carter (of which more later), Steve Demuth gave the BRMS track keynote – Make Change Work to Your Advantage. Steve’s focus is on the potential competitive advantage of rules. Automate decisions, he said, are everywhere – with which I would completely agree – especially if you correctly consider micro [...]

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Live from DIALOG – Pierre Haren Keynote

February 25, 2008

Monday morning here at DIALOG and the keynotes are up next. The show has about 300 attendees, about half customers, representing about 18 countries. First on is Pierre Haren, Chairman and CEO of ILOG. Pierre gave a quick overview of 20 years of ILOG history and he then focused on ILOG’s mission:
Make better decisions faster [...]

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Some thoughts on designing customer interactions for a quality experience

February 13, 2008

My friend Bob Glushko and Lindsay Tabas wrote an interesting paper last year that Bob pointed out to me earlier this month – Bridging the “Front Stage” and “Back Stage” in Service System Design. I liked the paper as it raised some interesting issues about customer interactions, in particular whether interaction design or outcomes is [...]

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Automating “warm fuzzies”

January 22, 2008

I saw this post on CustomerThink – Automation Overkill – in which Ginny Wiedower correctly points out that automation of customer treatment can result in an impersonal feel and that customers appreciate the “warm fuzzies” that come from personal interactions. While I don’t disagree with her, there are two things worth considering. Firstly, as I [...]

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Using EDM to improve first call resolution

January 15, 2008

Continuing this week’s theme of Enterprise Decision Management or EDM in customer service, I am going to focus on one of the most important metrics in call centers – first call resolution. I saw a nice description of what this means in Tools To Improve First Call Resolution on CRM Daily:
When you call a toll-free [...]

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What does “Enterprise” mean in Enterprise Decision Management?

January 8, 2008

One of the biggest sources of confusion with Enterprise Decision Management or EDM is the worry that it requires enterprise-wide adoption to be valuable. That, unless a huge project is undertaken to adopt the technologies and approaches required, no value will be gained. “Enterprise” is, after all, one of the most overused term in the [...]

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Why ARE you still generating reports?

December 18, 2007

Mike Kavitz asked this question – Why are you still generating reports? – on his blog today and it made me think. Why ARE you still generating reports? Not just in the way Mike means the question (why is IT generating reports instead of empowering users with information). I mean this in a broader way [...]

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Enterprise Metadata for a curious reader

December 17, 2007

Mike replied to my post about his question on enterprise metadata. He, like me, prefers David Marco’s definition of metadata as “all physical data and knowledge from inside and outside an organization, including information about the physical data, technical and business processes, rules and constraints of the data, and structures of the data used by [...]

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