decision services

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

More on decisions and decision management

July 29, 2010

Syndicated from B-Eye-Network
I recently wrote an article for the IIA on decisions, decision management and analytics. This was prompted by Tom Davenport’s recent interview on the Sloan Business Review on Reengineering your decision making processes about analytics and how companies make decisions. This interview also prompted Boris Evelson of Forrester to write this blog post [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

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: [...]

Read the full article →

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Paying for rules by the rule with IDIOM

April 20, 2010

I have blogged about the folks at IDIOM before and I recently heard that they are making IDIOM Decision Manager available under a new free/very low cost price plan. Not a trial or test plan, but a real pricing model that supports commercial development and full ownership of generated code at what can only be [...]

Read the full article →

Thoughts on Pega acquiring Chordiant

March 15, 2010

The news today is that Pegasystems (rules-based business process management) is acquiring Chordiant (decision-centric CRM). This is interesting news as it merges a company (Chordiant) with a very decision-centric/decision services separate from process mindset with one (Pega) that has mixed rules and process together much more.
Chordiant have been one of my companies to watch for [...]

Read the full article →

More on replacing COBOL with something useful

February 10, 2010

Lisa posted an interesting comment on an old post of mine (Why don’t you replace COBOL with something useful (not Java)) in which she make some interesting comments:
I understand your last point that using a declarative “model” such business rules would be preferable to replace legacy COBOL applications instead of using a procedural language.
Indeed. [...]

Read the full article →

Smarter systems for uncertain times – #brf keynote

November 5, 2009

I gave a keynote at the Business Rules Forum today on Smarter systems for uncertain times.  I gave the presentation without slides and had planned to use my notes as a post but, as the notes ran to 5,000 words, I have decided to write a white paper based on them instead!
To keep you going [...]

Read the full article →