design

IBM IMPACT Day 2 Keynotes

May 1, 2012

Johan Gerber of MasterCard kicked things off on day 2. MasterCard does not actually issue the cards with their logo on, they are a technology company that provides a network to link consumers, 32,000,000 businesses and 22,000 card issuers. The network is very high performance, handling 100 pieces of information and processing each transaction in [...]

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IBM IMPACT Forbes Mini Main Tent

April 30, 2012

The Forbes Mini Main Tent was kicked off by Mike Perlis, CEO of Forbes. Mike focused on how to build a business as strong as the Forbes brand – something with four legs:

Keep print business on track
Build the digital business for growth
Develop brand extensions like conferences and international
Become a great technology company

This last one is [...]

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Early bird pricing on European training expiring

April 23, 2012

The early bird pricing on our 2-day workshop in Europe expires this week. This workshop cover the essentials of Decision Management, the effective use of business rules and Business Rules Management Systems and the role of analytics:

Berlin – June 4/5 – Register here.

The class covers:

An introduction to Decisions and Decision Management
Categorizing and identifying decisions
Characteristics and design [...]

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Target variables matter but so do decisions

April 8, 2012

Dean Abbot wrote a great post recently “Why Defining the Target Variable in Predictive Analytics is Critical” in which he referenced the CRISP-DM approach to building predictive analytic models and talked about the importance of target variable selection in building an effective model. The thrust of Dean’s post was the crucial point that because
The target [...]

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Can good decisions have bad outcomes?

March 22, 2012

There was an interesting discussion on LinkedIn recently – A good decision is the same as a good outcome. True, False, or “I don’t know? This illustrates one of the key challenges in Decision Management Systems – because good decisions can have bad outcomes.
This can seem counter-intuitive. After all if a company makes a strategic decision, [...]

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First Look – USoft

February 14, 2012

USoft has been a vendor in the Decision Management space for a while. They started as Comtecno in 1986, become part of Unisys in 1995 then Ness Benelux in 1999 before returning to their current status as an independent Dutch software company in 2010 as USoft B.V. The software has had a much more consistent [...]

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Workshop: Decisions and Decision Management (Berlin, Germany)

February 8, 2012

[ June 4, 2012 to June 5, 2012. ] I am giving a live 2-day workshop in Berlin, Germany this summer on Decisions and Decision Management.

Organizations must understand how to identify and classify decisions and how to assess the potential for business rules and analytics to support and improve those decisions. They need to understand the available technologies and approaches and the long and [...]

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Business rules (Drools) job opening in Ann Arbor

January 9, 2012

A customer of mine is looking for a Drools developer to be based in Ann Arbor, MI:
HealthMedia, a member of Johnson & Johnson’s Family of Companies, is recruiting for a dynamic Java/Drools Developer to join our top-notch software development team, located in Ann Arbor, MI. This talented individual will be building applications using Drools/Java/J2EE (or [...]

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First Look – Ideate

December 7, 2011

Ideate is an Application Framework from a company called Consilience International that was started about 2 years ago by a couple of process folks looking to do something that was more suitable for highly evolvable, dynamic environments where runtime adaption was important. These kinds of dynamic applications are increasingly a focus for companies. Consilience’s view [...]

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Opening Keynotes at #BBCCon11

November 1, 2011

Gladys Lam kicked if off by introducing the three chairs of the conference – Kathleen Barret Chair of IIBA who heads up the business analysis tracks, Roger Burlton of BPTrends who heads up the business process tracks and Ron Ross of BRSolutions who heads up the business rules forum tracks. The three chairs then came [...]

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Book Review – Agile Business Rules Development

October 4, 2011

Decision Management can only succeed if the business rules for decisions can be effectively managed. Effective management must involve both business and IT organizations. There must be alignment and collaboration if the business rules are to be managed correctly. Indeed empowering this collaboration is the primary value of a business rules management system. Yet most [...]

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Update – New Wisdom RuleGuide

June 8, 2011

New Wisdom LLC
I have an update on the RuleGuide™ product from New Wisdom recently. I blogged about RuleGuide back in 2009. The product started with a focus on business rule management for the business team – allowing them to create a container of rules to pass to the IT group for implementation in a Business [...]

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Business Rules Forum Presentation: Begin with the Decision in Mind

May 17, 2011

[ November 2, 2011; 11:00 am to 12:00 pm. ] I am giving a cross-track presentation on Beginning with the Decision in Mind at the Building Business Capability event in Florida November 2 at 2pm Eastern.

Years of working with business rules and other decisioning technologies from business intelligence to predictive analytics and optimization has made one thing clear – technologies alone are not the answer. [...]

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First Look – Sparkling Logic

April 27, 2011

Sparkling Logic is a new company founded by a couple of old colleagues of mine and focused on what they call “Social Logic”. They have developed a social, cloud-based environment designed to help companies find the best, most defined decision logic that launched today at the Gartner BPM Summit. Fundamentally the new platform aims to [...]

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Fiserv are looking for a Decision Management Architect

March 3, 2011

A client of mine – Fiserv in Norcross GA – is looking a Decision Management Architect. This individual will be required to:

Partner with Fiserv Business Units and 3rd parties/partners to lead and facilitate the definition of a robust & scalable technical architecture foundation for the solution that would meet business requirements and vision of the [...]

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How many degrees of separation are there between your developers and users?

July 15, 2009

James Governor of Redmonk shared a great tweet today (he is @monkchips)
@dhague: 6 degrees of separation between developers and end-users is 3 too many. It’s hard to keep users happy with that disconnect
Now here’s one way to think about the degrees of separation between your users and your developers:

Users tell an analyst what they want
The [...]

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Harnessing and Coordinating Warranty Best Practices in a Global Enterprise

March 11, 2009

Terry Adams of Ingersoll Rand, the parent company of Trane, presented on harnessing and coordinating warranty best practices. IR includes Trance, Thermo King, Schlage, Steelcraft and others for about $17B worldwide. All these acquisitions have experience and systems so Ingersoll Rand has a vision of a Business Operating System to drive common [...]

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First Look – RuleXpress

March 2, 2009

RuleXpress is a tool from RuleArts designed to allow business analysts to capture their vocabulary or terms and source business rules relevant to their business and their business problems. RuleXpress is not a business rules management system nor is it a modeling tool in the sense of a UML modeling tool. It is a tool [...]

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SOA is necessary for agility but not sufficient

December 8, 2008

Fred Cummins had a post on the topic of measuring agility in which he gives two ways to assess how well SOA supports agility.
When a business change is considered

how many services must change to accommodate the new business requirements
for services that change, how significant are the changes

It is this second point that interests me. When [...]

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Rules in tables, spreadsheets and diagrams

October 29, 2008

Jan presented on Rules in tables, spreadsheets and diagrams: Towards High Definition Communication. Decision tables are ways to represent sets of rules and there are many ways to represent sets of rules including trees and graphs. Some ways of representing rules are clearer than others and some are better for validation of the rules. You [...]

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