JT on EDM

This week’s event calendar is below. The intent of this weekly post is to focus on web events coming in the next few weeks and conferences in the coming months. If you know about web or physical events around business rules, analytics, optimization or decision management, please let me know – james@decisionmanagementsolutions.com.
Web Events:

Silverlink: Applying Analytics [...]

I am speaking at the Brainstorm conference in San Francisco and blogging a couple of sesssions. First up today is Michael Melenovsky (formerly of Gartner) on Accelerating BPM Adoption – creating a vision and establishing a roadmap. Michael made the great point that companies sometimes get started with BPM to try it out and then [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ
Jim Sinur had a short post on The Power of Visibility with BPM Enabled Processes that made me think about another kind of visibility – visibility of decisions. One of the most powerful benefits of adopting business rules to manage decisions is that the approach generates increased visibility into the decision making process [...]

Jim Sinur asked (and answered) a similar question on this blog recently – Do I Really Need a Business Rule Capability? Now I generally talk about Decision Services as the driver for business rules – services that answer business questions for other services – so how can you tell that a service is ideal for [...]

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
This headline came from a briefing I got from LucidEra about their spring release and was so good I just had to use it. Think about it – if all a dashboard does is stress you out and raise your blood pressure by telling you what’s wrong without giving you any help as [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ
Jim Sinur, over on the Gartner blog, has a post this week on Rule Guided Processes are the Way of the Future in which he says
There are obvious benefits in making business policies/rules explicit and easily changed via accompanying quick-change processes.
Now I have blogged before about the power of business rules and decision [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ
Well last week was exciting on the ebizQ blog – thousands of new visitors after a link from a popular programming blog. This article – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – referred to an old article of mine – Don’t soft-code, use business rules that had been prompted by his [...]

Jim Sinur posted BPM Needs to Add More Intelligence to Decisions Surrounding Processes and said:
Going forward, I see a need for more sophisticated decisions that will require a deeper integration of rules, analytics, and complex events.
If you read my blogs, you know I agree with this statement in broad terms. I think, however, that the [...]

A press release caught my eye recently on CRM – Gartner Identifies the Top Six CRM Marketing Processes for a Cost-Constrained Economy. Two of the six processes Gartner identified seem to me to require decision management to be done well.
1.Retention Management
Retaining high value or potential high-value customers is essential in difficult economic times. Gartner advises [...]

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.