decision service

New White Paper: Decisions at the Heart of Your Processes

May 2, 2011

A new white paper is up on Decision Management Solutions company site, “The Decisions at the Heart of Your Processes - How Decision Management simplifies business processes and improves results.” It is a companion paper to the workshop I gave last week at Gartner BPM 2011.
Summary: Companies applying Business Process Management can create simpler and more [...]

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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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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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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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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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IBM Business Process Manager 7.5

April 12, 2011

The new Business Process Manager 7.5 brings together the WebSphere Lombardi Edition and WebSphere Process Server in a single go-forward product. IBM wanted to bring the power of the WPS runtime and the simplicity of the Lombardi platform while significantly improving design time governance and end to end  visibility. The new product has:

Process Server
The evolution [...]

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Decision Management: Orchestrating Consistent Enterprise-Wide Decisions

April 11, 2011

As companies move to this more changeable, uncertain world that requires a coordinate extended enterprise, it is essential to manage decisions as well as processes – not by using process management to manage decisions but by managing decisions alongside processes. These operational decisions – micro decisions – are the front line in driving business agility [...]

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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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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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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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Jan Vanthienen on Decision Tables

March 23, 2011

Jan Vanthienen of the University of Leuven presented to the Object Management Group’s session on Decision Modeling Notation. He began by discussing how business processes need flexibility and this means you cannot hard code rules and decisions in your processes – processes often don’t change even when the decisions within them do. Rule Tasks in [...]

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Decision Management and Insurance – Capitalize on Intelligence to Manage Losses

February 23, 2011

Many insurers have been investing heavily in claims systems to reduce costs and improve efficiency, implementing claims processes and web-based claims systems. These validate claims before submitting them and use workflow to reduce costs and improve efficiency. The growth in data volume in claims has led to increased use of analytics and using claims data [...]

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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 – 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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Future trends in business rules (with a little help from my friends)

January 20, 2011

I was presenting this week to a company that asked what trends I saw in business rules. I had my ow thoughts but I also reached out to some other experience business rules implementers. Here’s what we came up with:

A broader context for business rules

Business rules are increasingly adopted as part of a broader effort [...]

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Analytics – the new path to value: IBM/MIT Sloan study

November 10, 2010

IBM and MIT/Sloan recently published “Analytics – the new path to value“. This study had a lot of interesting points and was very decision management centric in my mind. Some thoughts:

The main challenges for companies adopting analytics were innovating to be deliver competitive differentiation and growing revenue.
Reducing costs, gaining efficiencies and profitably retaining and acquiring [...]

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Update – Visual Rules 5.0

November 10, 2010

I got an update from the folks at Innovations Software while I was attending this year’s Building Business Capability conference. This week sees the release of Visual Rules 5.0 and it has some great new features. I last wrote about release 4.5 last year.
The big news with this release is web-based authoring of business rules. [...]

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Right Time Business Optimization

October 29, 2010

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
Mike Ferguson presented on Right Time Business Optimization using on-demand and event-driven analytics at the Teradata Partners conference. Business optimization, Mike says, is about continuously knowing what is the best action to take and when to take it in every business process to dynamically keep a business [...]

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Product Update – FICO Blaze Advisor in the cloud

October 18, 2010

FICO had an interesting announcement today – Blaze Advisor, their business rules management system, is supporting Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform for cloud deployments (the press release is here). The announcement is a first step only – at this stage Microsoft and FICO have focused solely on verifying the deployment of decision services built using Blaze [...]

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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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