decision service

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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What, exactly, do you mean by business rules

October 8, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
Scott Cleveland had an interesting post this week on the single greatest benefit of BPM that included the information that 17% thought it was “Change business rules and processes without impacting underlying applications”. This focus on agility is not, perhaps, surprising but it prompted an interesting comment from John [...]

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Oracle Real Time Decisions at Dell #oow10

September 20, 2010

I blogged a couple of internal Oracle sessions on RTD (Oracle Real Time Decisions in e-commerce #oow10, Oracle RTD Roadmap #oow10) and now we get a chance to hear a customer speak – Dell with some help from Objectifi. Octane is Dell’s brand name for their RTD project – the platform has a number of [...]

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Oracle RTD Roadmap #oow10

September 20, 2010

The Oracle Real Time Decisions (RTD) roadmap began with a quick review of Oracle RTD (see my earlier post on the role of RTD in e-commerce) – an analytical decision service that sits between the operational and analytic applications of an organization so that operational business processes can be analytically enhanced. Crucially it combines prescriptive [...]

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Oracle Real Time Decisions in e-commerce #oow10

September 20, 2010

I am attending a few sessions at Oracle OpenWorld this week and the first one is an overview of Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD) in e-commerce. I have reviewed RTD 3.0 before. The context for using RTD is that consumers are harder to reach, satisfy and retain – their behavior evolves more quickly, there is more [...]

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First Look – Kana

August 24, 2010

I got an update from Kana this week. Kana, for those of you that don’t know, is a product/solution company focused on helping enterprises with their customer service experience – what they call Service Experience Management. Kana has over 600 B2C customers across banking, telecommunications, retail as well as high-tech, travel, manufacturing etc. They are [...]

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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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Fall events to learn more about decision management

July 27, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
I am speaking or giving workshops at three events this fall and all three represent good opportunities for you to learn more about decision management:
First up is RuleFest 2010 in San Jose October 11-14. I am speaking on October 12 10:00 am to 10:50 on “Decision Services Need More Than Rules”. Rules Fest bills [...]

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Speaking at RulesFest 2010

July 27, 2010

[ October 12, 2010; 10:00 am to 10:50 am. 10:00 am to 10:50 am. ]

I am going to be speaking at Rules Fest 2010 – the International Conference on Reasoning Technologies. I am speaking on Tuesday October 12, 10:00am on “Decision Services Need More Than Rules”. The conference is October 11-14 at the Dolce Hayes Mansion Resort, San Jose, CA. Rules Fest bills itself as the world’s only [...]

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First Look – Experian hosted decisioning solutions

May 24, 2010

I got a quick update from Roger Ahern at Experian recently. Roger runs a recently founded group focused on hosted decisioning applications. Experian also has a Decision Analytics group with teams handling software (their Strategy ManagementSM and ProbeSM products), fraud products (like Precise IDSM) and Decision Sciences (custom analytic models and related services).  Experian’s Credit [...]

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First Look – Modellica Decision Engine

May 20, 2010

I got an update on Modellica’s Decision Engine recently. I was referred to Modellica by the folks at GDS Link who use the Modellica rules capability in their DataView 360 product. Modellica is a European rules and decision management solution with 20 or so projects for 10 clients (one in the US, the rest in [...]

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Flexible yet permanent – the power of business rules

May 18, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
Sapphire, SAP’s big show, is on this week and I have been following the twitter stream (I was invited but couldn’t make it). Merv Adrian (@merv) had a sequence of posts about some SAP customers (Shell and Unilever) that really struck me:

Shell … “Once you pour electronic concrete, it’s hard to get out.”
Unilever: [...]

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Some thoughts on SAP/Sybase, CEP and decisioning

May 13, 2010

There have been a number of twitter conversations around the recent SAP/Sybase news that make me want to write more than 140 characters in response. These fall into three main categories:

Does the announcement have an impact on those considering decision management strategies
What, exactly, do mobile workers need and does Sybase deliver this for [...]

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First Look – ADAPA 3.0: Decision Management in the cloud

May 4, 2010

Business rules and analytics on the cloud! Finally!
Seriously, the folks at Zementis have long had their PMML deployment engine running on the amazon.com compute cloud and have had an on-premise solution that combines business rules (based on Drools) and PMML.  ADAPA – Adaptive Decision and Predictive Analytics – is the Zementis product that manages and [...]

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