evolve

Decision Management Systems drive the second economy

October 20, 2011

Cross-posted from International Institute for Analytics
There was a great article recently in the McKinsey Quarterly – The Second Economy. In it W Brian Arthur discusses the fact that
Digitization is creating a second economy that’s vast, automatic, and invisible—thereby bringing the biggest change since the Industrial Revolution.
It’s a good article and worth a read. Brian talks [...]

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IBM WebSphere update

April 11, 2011

Helping clients transform their business is the theme. In the rapidly changing world, transformation is not optional and it doesn’t come easy. IBM talks about a “culture of adaptability” and about complex business ecosystems that pull together capabilities from multiple companies as part of delivering new products and services. IBM’s recent focus has been on [...]

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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: [...]

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Webinar: Capture your complex business rules by asking pragmatic questions

October 23, 2009

[ November 17, 2009; 10:00 am to 11:00 am. ] The sixth webinar in the series. Decisioning rules can come by the hundreds or thousands.  These rules often involve large number of criteria. How do you capture that many business rules with so many variations without going crazy?  This presentation outlines a pragmatic approach based on developing business questions to create complex decision tables.  These [...]

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Decision management and the top 4 concerns of CIOs

September 29, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
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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A reader asks about decision services with multiple answers

September 28, 2009

One of the questions I get regularly can be summarized like this: I see how a decision service works when it returns an answer but can it return multiple answers? As one reader put it:
Suppose we want to go from India to the USA. There are number of alternatives and many flights that are available. [...]

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Risks of pursuing BPM without decisioning

September 18, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Inspired by this post by Vijay on Art of Software Reuse (Risks With Pursuing BPM Without SOA) I thought I would write something about the risks of pursuing BPM without decisioning – without decision management.
When BPM is pursued without pursing decision management in parallel the direct consequence is that decisions become an afterthought [...]

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Using busines rules in stable, core processes

September 3, 2009

Talking with SAP today I made the comment that the best place to use business rules was often in stable, core business processes because those processes don’t change, only the decision rules within them. This clearly struck a chord with @GregChase and it made me think I should write a slightly longer version of what [...]

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Some thoughts on Application Development 2.0

August 12, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
As the summer doldrums roll on I thought I would try and stir things up a little with a “2.0″ post – specifically some thoughts on a software stack for “Application Development 2.0″. Such a stack would:

Model processes, events and decisions as first class objects
Support declarative (rules-based) approaches to developing business logic
Use visual [...]

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Getting business and IT alignment with business rules

July 22, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Michael Cote of Redmonk had a nice piece on over on his People over Process blog. He made a series of great points about the risk of business and IT people not being aligned – risks to the business and to IT. In particular I was struck by this comment:
What happens here [...]

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A message for the application developer in the mirror

July 7, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Mike Gualtieri is always interesting over at the Forrester Blog For Application Development & Program Management Professionals. This week he has a post called Do Application Developers Need To Change Their Ways? In the post he asks developers to look at the person in the mirror (he’s been listening to Michael Jackson’s song [...]

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Going Beyond Budgeting!

May 18, 2009

I spoke last week at a conference hosted by the Beyond Budgeting Roundtable. I spoke, as you might expect, on the topic of decision management and how it can deliver the kinds of systems a modern company needs. The conference overall was on the (frankly very appealing) idea that budgets can and should be replaced [...]

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Empowering Business Users To Embrace Change

May 5, 2009

Connie Moore of Forrester presented on empowering business users to embrace change and began with a great quote from a customer – “Change NEVER settles down”! You need to embrace change and accept it as a norm – to accept that business processes and dynamic business processes. In this environment, business people play an essential [...]

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Designing and implementing a web-based warranty system

March 12, 2009

Frank Kozlowski of Kohler presentedf on a web-based warranty system. When they set out to develop the system their goals were to move to a start-of-the-art, easy to use system that was web-based so dealers could enter claims directly anywhere in the world (they have 12,000 dealers). They wanted to reduce their cycle time from [...]

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Decision Management and software development II – Model Driven Engineering

February 13, 2009

Continuing this weeks posts on using decision management to improve development,  I thought I would post on how decision management should be part of model-driven development (model-driven engineering, a model-driven architecture or whatever).
The recent, and premature, discussion of the death of SOA led Johan den Haan to post SOA is dead; long live Model-Driven SOA [...]

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Decision Management and software development I – Agile

February 13, 2009

Last week I posted Focusing on decisions to improve the software end product and I decided that this week’s posts would be a series of follow-ups on how decision management can and should impact software development. Today on how it should impact/be a part of Agile, tomorrow on Model-Drive Engineering and Thursday on DSLs (Domain [...]

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First Look – ILOG and Relativity for legacy modernization

July 21, 2008

The folks at ILOG and Relativitiy recently announced a new integration between their products – Legacy IT Modernization enabled by ILOG and Relativity Technologies Business Rules Solutions. I got a chance to chat with them today about what was new and different in this latest attempt to bring legacy modernization and business rules together. Relativity’s [...]

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The power and challenges of decision management packages

June 8, 2008

David Greer had a cutely named post this week – The Engine That Can. David and I had a nice chat about eOptimize a few days ago and I thought I would respond to his post with some thoughts of my own. eOptimize’s product is unlike those often described as decision management applications – it [...]

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The Future of Application Development

May 21, 2008

I’m going to be on stage with Mike Gualtieri soon but I thought I would drop in and listen to him on the future of application development. Sadly this meant missing a session on BI but even I can’t be in two places at once. Mike’s theme is that the value of application developers in [...]

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Age of Dynamic Business Applications

May 21, 2008

Dean Hager from Lawson came on to follow-up on the dynamic business applications story. Dynamic means “continuous change, activity, or progress” and Enterprise Applications “suck at this” to use his words. But this is a problem as the world is changing – people change, events cause change, the business climate changes and more. He asked [...]

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