decision making

Business Rules Forum Workshop: Decision Management – Practical Steps to Get More From Your Business Rules Investment

April 26, 2011

[ October 31, 2011; 10:30 am to 1:30 pm. ] I am giving a workshop on Decision Management: Practical Steps to Get More From Your Business Rules Investment Monday October 31, 1:30-4:30pm Eastern at the Building Business Capability 2011 conference in Florida. The business rules approach, and business rules management systems, work. Organizations adopting them show clear benefits and a positive return on investment. Practical [...]

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First Look – Information Builders

April 25, 2011

I recently got a briefing from Information Builders, an independent business intelligence (BI) and enterprise information integration/management (EIM) vendor founded in 1975. They sell their BI and EIM solutions separately, though they are increasingly selling these solutions together. They have 1,350 employees and 12,000 customer sites as well as a strong OEM portfolio. They find [...]

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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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Separation of concerns and the Service-Oriented Business Process

April 11, 2011

Nicklas Holmberg from the Lund School of Economics and Management in Sweden presented on the importance of separation of concerns in business process design. His work has been in healthcare, particularly around a system for vaccination management, and is focused on business rules and a business rules-centric approach to designing services and processes.
Nicklas began by [...]

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Leveraging customer data to drive business decisions

April 5, 2011

Interesting panel with folks from the Venetian, Marriott and Nextag discussing customer intelligence. First they were asked about their use of analytics:

Nextag is an online comparison shopping engine that assembles data from 10,000 merchants online for consumers. They make money by buying clicks on search engines and then getting payments from merchants for referrals. The [...]

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First Look – SAS/OR

March 31, 2011

I have been doing more thinking about optimization recently and thought I should get caught up with the OR (Operations Research) folks at SAS to see what they are doing. They see OR technologies as part of the overall analytics spectrum and feel that anything that improves the rigor of decision making without unduly constraining [...]

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Operational business decisions the Ron Ross way

March 24, 2011

I have been reading some of Ron Ross’ recent pieces on operational decisions. First there is a nice article called “Operational Business Decisions: Whose Decisions Are They Anyway” on BR Community. A short read this makes some great points that are worth re-iterating:

We need to focus on a decision “the way business people see it” [...]

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Decisions in IBM WebSphere/ILOG BRMS

March 23, 2011

Christian de Sainte Marie from the ILOG group at IBM presented to the OMG Decision Model Notation day on the role of decisions in the ILOG Business Rules Management System. Christian started by describing a BRMS (see my brief on what is a BRMS) and the ILOG BRMS in particular. He drilled down a little [...]

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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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First Look – Ingres VectorWise

March 1, 2011

I got an update from the folks at Ingres the other data to talk about Ingres VectorWise. Like many of the companies I have spoken to recently, Ingres is focused on how to provide an analytic infrastructure that handles the increasing volume and complexity of data so that analysis can be done on up to [...]

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Decision Management and Insurance – Business Optimization and Governance

February 24, 2011

Strategy Meets Actions’ research reports that insurers have tens, hundreds, even thousands of initiatives. To achieve these goals, aligning the business and IT is critical, as is setting the right priorities, and ensuring technology investments support these priorities.
Decision Management focuses on the key business decisions, and moves away from a focus on functional processes and [...]

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Decision Management and Insurance – multi-channel distribution and customer communication

February 22, 2011

Insurers face an explosion of direct sales channels: websites, mobile and call centers, with the rapidly evolving world of social media opening up even more opportunities. Driving consistent customer treatments and profitable direct sales across dynamic distribution channels, while effectively managing risk, is a huge challenge. As Deb pointed out, linking all customer communication together [...]

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Decision Management and Insurance – Apply Smarts to Underwriting

February 16, 2011

When companies use Decision Management to put data and analytics to work in underwriting, the results are dramatic. For example, one insurance company with about 750,000 policies implemented Decision Management and risk-based underwriting for use across its channels. The company achieved an 8-point reduction in combined ratio in its first year. This was the result [...]

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Investing in your lowest level employees with Decision Management

February 11, 2011

My old friend Marcia Conner pointed me to this great piece yesterday Investing at the Bottom of the Ladder that discussed how “Companies that invest in their lowest-level employees are more productive and more profitable”. Personally I found this cheering and a nice counterpoint to the outsource everything, always reduce costs no matter what mindset [...]

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Gleanster and its BI research

February 1, 2011

I was recently sent a copy of a Gleanster report. Gleanster for those who have not heard of it is a new company (founded by an old colleague of mine, Jeff Zabin, and others) that delivers free research. It is not clear what its business model, exactly, but for readers of the blog it represents [...]

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Here’s how to put strategic thinking into action

January 6, 2011

I was reading this article on Have you tested your strategy lately? in the McKinsey Quarterly and I was struck by test 10: Have you translated your strategy into an action plan?
This struck me because one of the most persistent problems I see in corporate strategy is what I call the “make it so” problem. [...]

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Elements of Business Analytics

November 17, 2010

Syndicated from IIA
My friends at SAS, a sponsor of IIA, have a nice piece on their Knowledge Exchange – Elements of a Business Analytics Framework for IT. This lays out their view on the different kinds of decision types and maps them to decision frequency. Both in Smart (Enough) Systems and in my blog posts [...]

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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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Predixion, Zementis and Lyzasoft

October 26, 2010

Interesting announcements last week from three companies I have reviewed recently – Predixion, Zementis and Lyzasoft. Predixion has developed some interesting cloud-based predictive analytic technology – tools to load data from Excel and build predictive models from it – while Lyzasoft has a nice collaborative business intelligence environment and [...]

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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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