design

Workshop: Decisions and Decision Management (Berlin, Germany)

February 8, 2012

[ 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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Introducing SOA Design Patterns

October 7, 2008

Thomas was back on talking about the catalog of 85 SOA Design Patterns that he is publishing this year – SOA Design Patterns. Design patterns are a field-testing or proven design solution to a common design problem. Some are compound, most are atomic. These SOA Patterns overcome common design challenges for the successful adoption of [...]

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First Look – IDS Scheer ARIS Business Rule Designer

August 8, 2008

I had a chance to catch up with Marwane from IDS Scheer the other day and talk about ARIS, IDS Scheer’s enterprise modeling product. The ARIS architecture or platform has currently more than 25 products for enterprise modeling divided into 4 platforms (Strategy, design, implementation and controlling) and 6 solutions (Enterprise BPM, EA, SAP, [...]

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IBM, SOA and Business Rules

August 7, 2008

Well it seems that IBM believes in business rules too. I was reading SOMA: A method for developing service-oriented solutions which I found thanks to Eric Roch’s post on IBM’s SOA Methodology anda couple of things struck me:

Business rules get called out explicitly both in the meta model Eric shows and in the overall flow. [...]

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Enterprise Decision Management and the Software Development Lifecycle

July 14, 2008

One of my regular readers had a question today about Enterprise Decision Management and the Software Development Lifecycle – the EDMSDLC if you like. Here’s what he asked:
We do Business Rules in our approach… I guess one question would be, where does EDM fit in a typical SDLC? [company] does Requirements, we have a method [...]

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Business-Empowered Process Implementation

June 17, 2008

Bruce Silver led a panel on business-empowerment and BPMN. He emphasized that BPM is an approach, BPMS is a software stack for supporting this new approach AND that there is change in how business and IT work together. Business-empowered implementation is what he uses to describe this – no break between the business view [...]

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Here’s how to improve your personas with analytics

June 5, 2008

Some time ago the folks over at the Analytical Engine had a post about Data Driven Persona Development. I loved the way they described taking a very qualitative approach – persona development – and adding some analytic rigor to it. Given my interest in using analytics for segmentation and in developing different websites/experiences for different [...]

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