JT on EDM

Getting started at DIALOG I got to spend some time with Tom Rosamilia GM of WebSphere, Sandy Carter and Pierre Haren, CEO of ILOG discussing the ILOG acquisition by IBM.
Tom went first by pointing out that the acquisition seemed like a good idea when it was announced and since then the Smarter Planet initiatives and [...]

With the business world in a state of flux and everyone worried about what might happen next, and how they might respond to it, scenario testing (and its compatriot, stress testing) should be top of mind for executives. They should be thinking about different scenarios, testing out how those scenarios would effect their business and trying out various alternatives. On the risk side they should be using this kind of scenario planning to stress their assumptions – stress testing – to see how their financial reserves would cope with the various alternatives.

For too many executives, however, this kind of testing is done only at the aggregate level and done largely (if not completely) in Excel. I have nothing against Excel but this is clearly not really acceptable. Good scenario or stress testing should consider how customers, products, suppliers, locations will be impacted by the scenario at a granular level and then present rolled-up results, not simply attempt to model some averages or totals. Similarly, if executives want to develop alternative scenarios that would be effective in certain possible futures then they need to test those scenarios against actual transactions, actual customers, to see if they work.

Companies that have adopted decision management have the infrastructure to manage this. Decision management brings the crucial decisions – choices of actions – into the open and makes them explicit. Scenarios can be developed for these decisions and tested against real data. The results can be compared against what happened, or against alternative scenarios to see what would work best. Different assumptions can easily be fed into the decisions to see what impact those assumptions have and stress testing or scenario development conducted based on the results. Decision management makes all this possible. It’s still work, but it is much less work and the results can be much more precise and grounded in real decisions.

A growth in scenario management was one of my predictions for 2009 and Jim Sinur wrote a nice piece on this too – Scenario Planning is No Longer Optional.

Albert Wenger had an interesting post today Human Vs. Machine 2 in which he discussed the fact that some of the old AI promises may be starting to come true. While I am not sure I 100% agree with his characterization of Netflix’s recommendation engine as AI, I do see what he means.
The over promising [...]

An article caught my eye in the Teradata Magazine this month – Steve Brobst, CTO of Teradata, outlined 4 areas he thinks will drive data warehousing: Sensor Technology Pervasive BI In Database AnalyticsNon-Traditional Data Types I don’t disagree with Steve…

Recently, Ronan Bradley discussed the challenges for banks in the area of compliance, given the rapidly changing environment. He made three specific points with which I agree and that I think shows the value of a decision management approach for banks and others facing an unknown but difficult regulatory environment in the next year or [...]

Michele Edelman of Discover presented on Building Blocks of Decision Management: “Tools to Rule”. Michele spends a lot of time educating people inside Discover and her team use sources like McKinsey to show executives why EDM matters. For instance, a report on top 10 macro-economic trends:

Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly not just globally [...]

Today Chordiant announced their new Visual Business Director (CxVBD). I saw an early prototype of this some months back and got a more detailed look at the finished product at their recent Customer Advisory Board. I really like CxVBD as I think it shows the critical business value of externalizing decisions. I have yet to [...]

I live in Palo Alto and a new Mountain Mike’s Pizza has just opened up near us. Much as we like MM pizza we have two problems – we like wholewheat dough and, as several members of my family are lactose/milk intolerant, soy cheese. If you have visited or live in Palo Alto you will [...]

Stephan Chase of Marriott generated the third set of thoughts. He is working to make Marriott more customer-centric, in particular by employing predictive modeling to determine what customers are likely to do in the future while using results in marketing to create a learning organization. This is of course the heart and soul of decision [...]

Thanks to my friends at Bankwatch I heard today about eBank in Japan. The bank is described in this nice article on swiftcommunity.net. What struck me about this was the focus on complete automation of decision making – not just the processes and information colleciton, but the decision making itself. Is this the person they [...]