JT on EDM

I caught up with David Ullman of Robust Decisions the other day. Robust Decisions has an interesting product called Accord aimed at helping with decisions. While it is not aimed at exactly the same kind of decisions as the systems I usually review, I like the product and think there is some interesting synergy between [...]

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 [...]

I often write about the difference between decision support systems and the kind of systems that result from applying decision management – decision management applications. For instance, this post on To Hell with Business Intelligence, try Decision Management and this interview with Dan Power. Last week I came across a great way to describe the [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ
John Reynolds over on the Thoughtful Programmer had a great post a little while back – 19th Century BPMS. In it he said
I sometime find it useful to describe a BPMS in terms of things and people that you probably would have found in an office or factory in the 1890s
This struck me as [...]

Dan Rosanova wrote a piece on The SOA Knowledge Gap that made me think (again) about the value of business rules as a way to manage requirements. Dan points out that

“A unique SOA challenge is its need to bring together SMEs from across the enterprise.”

Now this is true but I don’t believe that better management of requirements is the answer. In fact what is needed is a way to turn what the SMEs know into something that can be managed in a repository and used to power systems directly. Working with SMEs to create sets of business rules to represent their know-how not only allows this knowledge to be stored in an executable format – reducing the likelihood of implementation error and speeding deployment and maintenance – it also allows each SME or SME group to manage their own rules. A modern Business Rules Management System (BRMS) will allow different users to have different access to rule sets, allowing each set of rules to be managed by those who know them best or those who “own” them. The BRMS can then be used to package up the relevant rules – typically many sets from many SMEs – into a decision service that can be deployed into a service-oriented architecture.
Because the SME’s can edit the rules directly, business agility is increased because the time from the SME realizing that a change is needed to the time when that change is deployed can be cut dramatically using the rule management features of a typical BRMS.
Dan’s comments about how to gather the know-how from SMEs are all good, but gathering their know how as requirements and not rules is going to limit the good it can do. I have blogged a lot on this topic but check out these two posts on the difference between requirements and Requirements and on how to fit business rules into a software development lifecycle.

Eric Siegel, who is chairing the new Predictive Analytics World show, presented on predictive analytics and business rules. Predictive analytics, says Eric, is a business intelligence technology that products a predictive score for each customer or prospect … and explanations thereof. These scores come from predictive models that are developed across your historical data. This [...]

Randy Saunders had a great post over on the Perfect Customer Experience -Can I please speak with a live agent? In it he has a great quote:
Forester’s study finds that 45 percent of consumers prefer to speak with a customer service agent to answer questions and resolve service issues, yet most walk away from customer [...]

Erudine is a British company a few years old and has released some new technology in a new process context – the Erudine Behaviour Engine (yes, the British spelling). Like many technologies, Erudine is targeting the business-IT divide, focusing on problems like those of translating requirements into systems, integrating the expertise of lots of people [...]

A reader sent me an interesting question after watching the ILOG seminar on scorecards and rules in which I participated earlier this week (recording of this rules and scorecards seminar is available). Here’s a summary of what he said:
One immediate comment I would have is that scorecarding seems to insert an extra unnecessary step. Rather [...]

Neil and I caught up with Expert System, a Semantic Intelligence company, last week to discuss their Cogito product. Expert System is based in Italy, has 145 employees and originally worked on spell checkers for Microsoft. While they have a lot of business in Europe they are now growing in the US. Their core pitch [...]