management

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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The three legged stool – business, analytics, IT

November 2, 2010

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
I was inspired to write something this week on the need to get people to collaborate by a post Jim Harris wrote called The Business versus IT—Tear down this wall! and the response Gary Cokins made in That Wall Dividing IT and Users. Both Jim and Gary [...]

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Smart meters need smart systems, not a better user interface

May 19, 2010

This article on CNET caught my eye this morning: Study: Smart meters need better user interface. I am always interested in smart meter stories as it has always struck me that this is a powerful way to reduce energy usage with all the long term benefits for consumers and producers this entails. I am often [...]

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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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First Look – Revolution Analytics

May 6, 2010

I got my first formal briefing from REvolution Computing recently. REvolution has been around for about 2 years. Originally they focused on bringing parallel computing power to R and providing some consulting around the language. They raised some new funding recently and now have a new management team, including CEO Norman Nie (co-founder of SPSS) [...]

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Teradata – Coca Cola and customer intelligence

April 27, 2010

Justin Honaman from Coca Cola presented on their use of Teradata in their customer intelligence program.  Coca Cola has a huge range of products, in many sizes, as well as dozens of bottlers and distribution partners. The 72 bottlers are limited to specific geographies, adding a layer of complexity to their business. Justin’s group, Customer [...]

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SAS and Accenture

March 29, 2010

I got a chance to catch up with Russ Cobb, Vice President, Alliances and Product Marketing at SAS about the SAS/Accenture announcement recently. One of the first questions, of course, is whether this was just a “Barney” relationship (I love you, you love me) or if it had any meat. Russ understood completely and said [...]

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A decision-centric platform supports collaboration

January 29, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.
Finally the platform must allow effective collaboration between all the various groups involved in decision making. The IT department that runs the operational systems, the business people who make decisions and set policy, the executives who drive strategy and even the analytic team [...]

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A decision-centric platform focuses on decisions

January 25, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform.
First and foremost a suitable platform must focus on decisions. It must support the definition of the decisions involved in running a business separate from the processes and functions that are involved. It should allow the business logic, the rules or semantics, of [...]

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A decisioning elevator pitch

November 24, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
So you’re the CIO of a Fortune 500 company and you step into an elevator with your CEO. He asks why the board should approve your seven figure Decision Management budget request. What’s your “elevator pitch” for decisioning?

Is it that decisioning can change the basic assumptions of your business – decoupling growth, revenue [...]

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Make Better Decisions

November 17, 2009

Tom Davenport published a new article recently in the Harvard Business Review titled Make Better Decisions. In it he gives some examples of bad decisions and asks why this decision-making disorder?
First, because decisions have generally been viewed as the prerogative of individuals—usually senior executives. The process employed, the information used, the logic relied on, have [...]

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Decisioning platforms and managing business rules

October 8, 2009

While at the recent Gartner BPM conference (twitter feed at #gartnerbpm) I got some interesting questions from @gagan_s. He saw my posts on the bare essentials of making rules work and @skemsley‘s post on my advanced decisioning for process excellence session (recording here).
The first question he asked was a follow-up to Jim Sinur (@jimsinur) saying [...]

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Adding decision management to your BPM initiative

September 22, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Last week I wrote a piece on the risks of pursuing BPM without decisioning. As promised, here are some thoughts on how to get started.

Identify your decisions
Step one is to find and name and manage the decisions that matter to your processes. Finding decisions is not always that easy, though it gets [...]

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Decision management and a decision-driven organization

September 18, 2009

Some time back I came across an HBR article called Who Has the D? How Clear Decision Roles Enhance Organizational Performance (fee for full article) and I heard from a friend today that Bain was using this approach (see this Bain article for instance Who has the “D”?) as part of building what it calls [...]

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Looking at code from both sides with business rules

September 18, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Sharon Machlis had a great piece over on Computerworld titled Opinion: I’ve looked at code from both sides now on her experience of being a developer on a project where she was usually a user. It’s an interesting experience that she describes and I was struck particularly by a couple of comments. First, [...]

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The answer to too much information and limited understanding is decision management (not experts)

July 7, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
The Evidence Based Management blog had a post on Why experts are so often wrong that discusses a book by Philip Tetlock (Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?)
In a world filled with expert predictions that are mostly incorrect, and filled with people who eagerly seek such predictions even [...]

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Making complex policies visual for the web

July 1, 2009

Another session at Brainstorm, this time a case study from Genentech. Genentech has many policy documents that are interrelated, complex and lengthy and yet essential to operations – employees must understand them and follow them. As Genentech has made progress on its process management initiative it has found that getting the participants in the process [...]

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On supporting decision management and collaborative decision making

June 26, 2009

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
Timo Elliot had an interesting post Gartner on Collaborative Decision Making in which he discussed a report from Gartner called The Rise of Collaborative Decision Making (and thanks to Nic Smith of Microsoft for the link). This kind of ad-hoc, collaborative decision making is critical in companies and technology to support it is [...]

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First Look – Accord

June 23, 2009

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 [...]

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Lesson from GM: Decisions > Processes

June 3, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Gary Comerford posted about Bex Huff’s identification of How one bad business process doomed GM. Like Gary I appreciated the analysis. However, the title is all wrong. This is not about a business process – I am prepared to bet that GM’s PROCESS for selecting and acquiring parts, signing up vendors etc was [...]

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