ebizQ

Is your legacy modernization program just “forward to the 70s”?

February 4, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ

Phil Murphey, over at Forrester, had a post on  Apps Modernization – What are Your Top Priorities in 2010/11? that reminded me I wanted to write about modernization a little before the year got too far advanced. As Phil says the coming years are going to be really interesting:
Leading edge technologies will become [...]

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A decision-centric platform supports collaboration

January 29, 2010

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This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.
Finally the platform must allow effective collaboration between all the various groups involved in decision making. The IT department that runs the operational systems, the business people who make decisions and set policy, the executives who drive strategy and even the analytic team [...]

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A decision-centric platform delivers traceability

January 28, 2010

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This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.
Because compliance is essential in decision making, the traceability of decisions and decision making logic to the organization’s objectives, regulations and policies is essential. Business users changing decision making must understand how that change will impact the organization, how it supports the organization’s [...]

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A decision-centric platform integrates case management

January 27, 2010

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This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.
Not only must the platform support complex and potentially long-running cases, it must do so in a decision- and automation-centric way. It is not enough for the platform to support the definition of complex cases and their tracking and management over time. It [...]

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A decision-centric platform supports automation

January 26, 2010

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This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.
Decision-centric organizations try to automate decisions where possible so any platform must allow the automation of decisions. Plugging decisions into high throughput, rapid response, transactional systems must be possible and real-time decision making supported. In addition the platform must provide automated support for [...]

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A decision-centric platform focuses on decisions

January 25, 2010

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This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.
First and foremost a suitable platform must focus on decisions. It must support the definition of the decisions involved in running a business separate from the processes and functions that are involved. It should allow the business logic, the rules or semantics, of [...]

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Other characteristics of decision-centric organizations

January 21, 2010

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Decision-centric organizations also focus on automating, not just supporting, decisions. They use this focus to develop simpler, standard processes and to become more event-driven. With decisions at the forefront, organizations need to change their thinking about automation. Instead of regarding information systems as simple stores of information that people use, they need to [...]

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Decision-centric organizations focus on decisions

January 20, 2010

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The first critical characteristic of a decision-centric organization, obviously enough, is a focus on decisions instead of processes or functions. The decisions an organization makes, the actions it selects from the possible alternatives are critical. Decisions are what make strategy real and drive results and performance against metrics. Implementing a strategy defined at [...]

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A decision-centric organization

January 19, 2010

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This week I thought I would write about decision-centric organizations. Organizations face many challenges in today’s business climate. Organizations whose success or failure is determined by the decisions they make (which claims to pay, which customers to target, which transactions to investigate for fraud) are handicapped by systems that are centered on processes [...]

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Smart systems in business

December 22, 2009

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K. Mani Chandy is one of my fellow bloggers on ebizQ and his first post had a title that caught my eye – Smart Systems in Business: A Biological Metaphor. Given my focus on decisions to make smarter systems (or, as Neil and I put it in our book, Smart (Enough) Systems) I [...]

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A predictive enterprise

December 18, 2009

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I was reading an old SPSS presentation the other day and found a great definition of a Predictive Enterprise:
A predictive enterprise:

Derives maximum value from its data assets
Understands its business by gaining deep insight
Leverages advanced analytics to predict outcomes
Turns this knowledge into action to optimize decision making across all areas of its operations

I [...]

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Decision Management and Event Processing

December 2, 2009

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My buddy Claye Greene, Principal Consultant at Technology Blue (a Decision Management Solutions partner) wrote a great little article on Decisions and Complex Event Processing that I highly recommend. Like Claye I think Event Processing and Decision Management are highlly complementary and Claye sums it up nicely in his article:
To maximize the success [...]

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A decisioning elevator pitch

November 24, 2009

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So you’re the CIO of a Fortune 500 company and you step into an elevator with your CEO. He asks why the board should approve your seven figure Decision Management budget request. What’s your “elevator pitch” for decisioning?

Is it that decisioning can change the basic assumptions of your business – decoupling growth, revenue [...]

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Predictive analytics panel at Business Analytics Summit

November 16, 2009

I hosted a panel last week on predictive analytics at the Business Analytics Summit. I was joined by Richard Boire of the Boire-Filler Group, Jean-Paul Isson of Monster.com and Michael Berry of Data Miners (and author of Data Mining Techniques, one of my favorite Data mining books). I asked a series of questions and we [...]

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KPI framework for a competitive edge

November 12, 2009

I am hosting a panel on Predictive Analytics at the Business Analytics Summit and I got a chance to attend a session beforehand where Dave Stodder presented on performance management and Key Performance Indicators.
Dave began by emphasizing that performance management is both a business and IT issue and that it needs to [...]

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Context-Aware computing needs Decision Management

November 6, 2009

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In a press release just over a month ago, Gartner said that Context-Aware Computing will provide significant competitive advantage. As the press releases says:
Gartner defines context-aware computing as the concept of leveraging information about the end user to improve the quality of the interaction. Emerging context-enriched services will use location, presence, social attributes, [...]

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The Decision Model and business rules

November 2, 2009

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The new book from Barb von Halle and Larry Goldberg, The Decision Model: A Business Logic Framework Linking Business and Technology, is now available. This book outlines an approach for capturing and managing the business rules you need to understand in order to implement a Decision Service. It complements the use of a [...]

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Some thoughts on rules, decisions, agility and more

October 9, 2009

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I got an interesting comment on my recent post about the top 4 concerns of CIOs.
Joanne makes a number of points in her comment that I thought should be addressed:
a business rules engine is not nearly enough. What is needed instead is a means to model manage and measure the impact of a [...]

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Decision management and the top 4 concerns of CIOs

September 29, 2009

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I was reading an article on The top 10 CIO concerns and I was struck by the first four:

Business productivity and cost reduction
IT and business alignment
Business agility and speed to market
Business process re-engineering

It seemed to me, reading this list, that all four of these were concerns that could be addressed [...]

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Adding decision management to your BPM initiative

September 22, 2009

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Last week I wrote a piece on the risks of pursuing BPM without decisioning. As promised, here are some thoughts on how to get started.

Identify your decisions
Step one is to find and name and manage the decisions that matter to your processes. Finding decisions is not always that easy, though it gets [...]

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