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Opening keynotes at IBM IMPACT 2011

April 11, 2011

Nancy Pearson and David Farrell kicked off the main event. 8,000 people at IBM IMPACT apparently and Nancy introduced the key themes – helping companies optimize for growth and focus on delivering results. The topics are based on a continued focus on getting business and IT to work together (a key theme of Decision Management [...]

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Attending IBM IMPACT 2011

April 9, 2011

[ April 11, 2011 to April 12, 2011. ] I will be attending the first couple of days of IBM IMPACT 2011. I will not be speaking but will be at a number of the Decision Management and ILOG sessions. If you would like to meet please DM me on Twitter (jamet123) or email me (james@decisionmanagementsolutions.com).

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Decisions in IBM WebSphere/ILOG BRMS

March 23, 2011

Christian de Sainte Marie from the ILOG group at IBM presented to the OMG Decision Model Notation day on the role of decisions in the ILOG Business Rules Management System. Christian started by describing a BRMS (see my brief on what is a BRMS) and the ILOG BRMS in particular. He drilled down a little [...]

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5 ways predictive analytics cuts enterprise risk

March 14, 2011

Eric Siegel opened Predictive Analytics World with a view of using predictive analytics in enterprise risk management. Eric began by giving some examples of “macro” risk – single, catastrophic risk events. But his focus, and the focus of predictive analytics, is on “micro” risk – risk-based micro decisions in my terminology. These are risk decisions [...]

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Rexer Data Mining Survey Results

March 8, 2011

Karl Rexer has just released the results from his annual survey of data miners – RexerAnalytics.com/Data-Miner-Survey-Results-2010.html. This year 735 data miners responded to an extended survey. Interesting facts from this year’s results:

CRM and Marketing remain the top focus area with goals like retaining customers and understanding them better coming top also.
Decision trees, regression analysis and [...]

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SAS Sales and Marketing Overview

March 7, 2011

Carl Farrell came up to talk about sales enablement and execution. 2010 was an interesting year in the Americas as the recovery was very inconsistent between countries in the Americas and across verticals. Strong growth in First Year Fees – 21% in US, 15% in Canada and 56% nearly in Latin America (with the Southern [...]

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First Look – Gurobi Optimization

March 2, 2011

Gurobi is the latest entrant to the mainstream optimization engine market (IBM/ILOG CPLEX and FICO Dash being the two main players with CPLEX having by far the largest market share). Gurobi was founded by Zonghau Gu, Ed Rothberg and Bob Bixby in 2008. The three of them were instrumental in the development of  CPLEX, the [...]

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What does IBM Watson mean for Decision Management and Analytics?

February 15, 2011

I have been thinking about IBM’s Watson for a while now. I met some of the team very early in their development and here we are today with Watson slugging it out on TV. To do this it must decompose the question, generate multiple hypotheses and then score them before synthesizing an answer and [...]

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Decision Management and Insurance – Putting the Data To Work

February 15, 2011

At the core of the Top 10 Imperatives for Insurers is putting the data to work – across channels, in day-to-day operations, in customer interactions and more.  Putting data to work means leveraging the historical data you have about your operations, performance and policy holders to systematically increase the value of your corporate decision assets. [...]

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Information Week Webinar – What, exactly, do you mean by business rules

December 1, 2010

[ December 9, 2010; 11:00 am to 12:00 pm. ] I am presenting at an IBM/Information Week webinar What, exactly, do you mean by business rules on December 9th. I will try to clear up the confusion between rules and decisions, explaining why this distinction is critical if you expect to incorporate improved agility into your organization’s ability to respond to market demands, competitive actions [...]

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Analytics Corner – a video interview with James Taylor

November 29, 2010

While I was attended the Information on Demand conference the folks at IBM interviewed me for their Analytics Corner videos. Mine is now available – check it out at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9ENpZf1Zsw or watch it below.

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Analytics – the new path to value: IBM/MIT Sloan study

November 10, 2010

IBM and MIT/Sloan recently published “Analytics – the new path to value“. This study had a lot of interesting points and was very decision management centric in my mind. Some thoughts:

The main challenges for companies adopting analytics were innovating to be deliver competitive differentiation and growing revenue.
Reducing costs, gaining efficiencies and profitably retaining and acquiring [...]

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Opportunities to meet me this fall

October 12, 2010

Show season kicked off today with RulesFest in San Jose. Great audience and good attendance for this technical show on business rules and related technology where I presented on Decision Services need more than rules. With that out of the way my schedule gets busy for a few weeks.
Next week I am giving a workshop [...]

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Speaking at IBM Business Analytics Forum 2010

October 12, 2010

[ October 27, 2010; 11:30 am to 1:00 pm. ] I am going to be speaking at IBM’s Information on Demand/Business Analytics Forum in Las Vegas. I will be on stage with Deepak Advani, who heads up the SPSS business analytics business, during the SPSS keynote on Wednesday. The keynote will focus on predictive analytics and on Decision Management – both the approach and the [...]

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Customer intimacy #bas2010

September 29, 2010

Customer intimacy is a hot topic these days. Customers are getting more complex because not only are they using multiple channels but because they have multiple online personalities – work, home, on behalf of a parent or child and so on. The fact that consumers trust each other (78%) but not ads (13% trust for [...]

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IBM Business Analytics and Optimization #bas2010

September 28, 2010

Rob Ashe and Fred Balboni kicked off the IBM Business Analytics Analyst Summit with a presentation on IBM’s overall strategy for analytics – product and consulting in an integrated view. Of course this is IBM so everything starts with Smarter Planet – and Smarter Planet begins with how to get insight to drive better performance, [...]

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More intelligent processes – a video and presentation

August 25, 2010

I spoke at an IBM event in Paris recently on More intelligent processes – choices and results. You can see the video (with French slides but me speaking English) here. The English slides are on SlideShare below:
More intelligent processes – choices and results
View more presentations from Decision Management Solutions.

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Scorecards – one place where rules and analytics meet

August 18, 2010

Eric Charpentier had a nice introduction to scorecards overs on his blog. He does a nice job of describing an additive scorecard, that is a scorecard designed to represent a predictive analytic algorithm (not to be confused with a dashboard-like scorecard). He does not talk much about reason codes – the ability of a scorecard [...]

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IBM, Unica and solution-oriented Decision Management

August 18, 2010

IBM recently announced it was buying Unica. As I work with both IBM and Unica I thought I should post some comments.
To me, this is an interesting example of the ongoing evolution of decision management as a market. Today most customers aren’t looking explicitly for decision management solutions. Rather they are seeking business solutions that [...]

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