decisioning

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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First Look – Attensity 5.5

February 16, 2011

I got a chance to catch up with Attensity after a long absence recently (I last blogged about Attensity in 2008). Attensity has been doing text analytics and customer experience monitoring for 10 years or more. Their approach includesfour steps –  Listen, Analyze, Relate, Act (from a decision management perspective it is nice to see [...]

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Human and automated judgment

February 8, 2011

Syndicated from International Institute for Analytics
Tom Davenport pointed me to an interesting article recently – Judgment Call or Automated Decision—Or Both? – by Jan Abrams. It’s an interesting article and I go back and forth as I read it in terms of agreeing or disagreeing with Jan.
First, let me say that the use of automated [...]

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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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IDC: Decision Management Market at $10B by 2014

January 18, 2011

The folks at IDC (Dan Vesset, Maureen Fleming, Steve Hendrick, Henry Morris and others) have just released Worldwide Decision Management Software 2010–2014 Forecast: A Fast-Growing Opportunity to Drive the Intelligent Economy – the first ever market sizing for “Decision Management”. This is exciting – it’s great to have a leading research organization like IDC pull [...]

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Book Review – BRFplus Business Rule Management for ABAP Applications

January 12, 2011

My friend Carsten Ziegler, with Thomas Albrecht, has just released a new book on business rules for SAP customers – BRFplus — Business Rule Management for ABAP Applications. I was delighted to provide a foreword to this book as I think BRFplus is a terrific tool for SAP customers, [...]

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First Look – SAS Customer Intelligence

January 4, 2011

I got a quick update from the customer intelligence folks at SAS recently. Customer Intelligence is SAS’ largest solution line (with dedicated sales, marketing and engineering) and they are projecting to have a record year in 2010. SAS describes their SAS  Customer Intelligence Suite as providing three core benefits for organizations, each based on a [...]

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Workshop at the Gartner BPM Summit

December 21, 2010

[ April 28, 2011; 10:45 am to 1:45 pm. ] I am giving a workshop – The Decisions at the heart of your process – at the Gartner BPM Summit in Baltimore, April 27-29 2011. This workshop introduces the decision management approach and critical decisioning technologies such as predictive analytics and business rules. The workshop is going to be highly interactive. As well [...]

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First Look – General Intelletics

November 30, 2010

I met General Intelletics at the recent Building Business Capability conference. The founder has been working in artificial intelligence and configurators for about 10 years. One of his clients wanted to put together an insurance program for a gold mine in Turkey – total premiums of about $4M/year. He found that there are no real [...]

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Analytics and the art of selling

November 23, 2010

I saw this interesting McKinsey piece recently – Rediscovering the art of selling – McKinsey Quarterly – Retail & Consumer Goods – Strategy & Analysis – and I was struck by the value of analytics in this context. What retailers really need to do, according to McKinsey, is focus on hiring sales people with personality, [...]

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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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First Look – in2clouds

September 29, 2010

in2clouds is focused on helping companies use Predictive Analytics to improve their business performance. Founded by MicroStrategy alumni and launched in 2009, in2clouds is a small company that has been working in hi-tech, financial services and retail. Seeing analytics as “the next big thing” they want to reduce the friction for mainstream adoption and help [...]

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Pegasystems and Chordiant – an update

September 14, 2010

I got an update from Pegasystems recently, mostly to talk about how the integration of Chordiant is going. I shared my original thoughts on the Pegasystems/Chordiant combination at the time but this was my first chance to chat with them since then.  Pegasystems continues to do well with its  12th record revenue quarter and climbing [...]

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First Look – DataInfoCom

September 1, 2010

I caught up with DataInfoCom recently – a research-oriented software company headquartered in Austin, Texas. Their focus is on what they call Predictive Decision Management. Their software product, OSMOSYS, delivers predictive decisioning over the Internet – Decisions as a Service or DaaS as I call it. Their customers include a couple of well known, Fortune [...]

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FICO Decision Management Platform – update

August 31, 2010

Model Builder 7.0, Decision Optimizer 6.1, Blaze Advisor 6.9
Decision Management remains the core focus for FICO with both a Decision Management platform and decisioning applications. The applications are increasingly built on top of the platform, sharing execution and modeling infrastructure. FICO still sees business rules as the basis for decisions, being improved and extended with [...]

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Webinar – Simplifying over-complex processes

August 30, 2010

One of the prime causes of over-complex processes is the inclusion of decision-making in process designs. Organizations that identify the decisions in their processes and manage them as peers – not part of the process but supporting it – find they can simplify process designs, increase agility and bring business users and IT into better [...]

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Clario – Update

August 26, 2010

I first blogged about Clario about a year ago, when they were focused on delivering a data mining/predictive analytic workbench on the web. Developing a new workbench, even with a compelling differentiator like being cloud-based, is difficult. The maturity of the competitive, hosted products and the tendency of analytic developers to be very entrenched with [...]

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Custom code and data integration thoughts

August 23, 2010

Julie Hunt (@juliebhunt) wrote a piece recently on Custom Code or Data Integration software tools in which she made some great points about the excessive use of custom code when integrating data. Two things I would like to add:

One of the drivers for custom code is that the integration of data requires a complex business [...]

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Update – SAS Model Manager

August 18, 2010

I got an update from SAS on SAS Model Manager recently. The new release came out August 17 alongside a new release of SAS Enterprise Miner and has some interesting new features. SAS Model Manager, as I noted in my previous review, supports the analytic model deployment lifecycle (from registering candidate models through validation, deployment, [...]

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IBM, Unica and solution-oriented Decision Management

August 18, 2010

IBM recently announced it was buying Unica. As I work with both IBM and Unica I thought I should post some comments.
To me, this is an interesting example of the ongoing evolution of decision management as a market. Today most customers aren’t looking explicitly for decision management solutions. Rather they are seeking business solutions that [...]

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