operational decision

Improving customer interactions one decision at a time

August 24, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
William Band at Forrester (@waband) recently tweeted that his next research project was:
When to use CRM apps vs BPM tools to improve customer interactions? Pros & Cons of each?
I replied that companies should be sure to manage customer treatment decisions too and he asked me to expand on that thought.
Every [...]

Read the full article →

On the importance of experimentation

August 4, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
The McKinsey Quarterly had an article today on Ten Tech-enabled business trends to watch and number 5 caught my eye -Experimentation and big data. As the authors say
What if you could analyze every transaction, capture insights from every customer interaction, and didn’t have to wait for months to get data from [...]

Read the full article →

Decisions, decision management and analytics

July 29, 2010

Syndicated from International Institute for Analytics

Tom Davenport was interview recently by the Sloan Business Review on Reengineering your decision making processes about analytics and how companies make decisions. While the interview is mostly focused on manual decision making, many of the points are just as valid when you consider decision management and decisioning technology as [...]

Read the full article →

The opportunity for opportunity analytics

June 23, 2010

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
Some time ago Neil Raden and I did some research on analytics. It was clear as we did this that there were two main threads of analytic use in companies – risk analytics and opportunity analytics. I blogged before on the use of analytics to manage risk one risk at a [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – IBM/SPSS Decision Management and Modeler

May 19, 2010

I received an update from IBM recently on IBM SPSS Decision Management 6 and IBM SPSS Modeler 14. IBM  sees organizations with many different data sources (inside and outside) that are moving from a traditional approach focused on reporting to one that involves “predict and act” – real-time, fact-driven decision making at the point of [...]

Read the full article →

Teradata – Key Messages

April 27, 2010

Randy Lea kicked off the Teradata Third Party Influencers event with Teradata’s key messages:

The best database for analytics
Obviously this is #1 for Teradata is to deliver on this with a focus on being “parallel everywhere” while having the database do as much as possible. Also provide a self-service portal for DBAs, offer query rewrite/optimizing, hotspot [...]

Read the full article →

Decision engines in financial services

April 26, 2010

This is a piece I wrote for Chris Pratt’s quarterly financial institutions newsletter
The use of technology to automate and manage decisions, especially high volume decisions essential to day-to-day operational execution, is expanding rapidly. Beginning with the consumer credit business, use of decision engines and decision management has spread to all aspects of financial services [...]

Read the full article →

Challenge or Opportunity: Take Control

April 12, 2010

First SAS Global Forum Executive Conference session with Jim Davis, CMO of SAS, talking about fact-based decisioning.
A good crisis is a terrible thing to waste
Jim asked the audience if they took the opportunity of the recent crisis to re-tool their business, to re-assess how to run the business. One of the key ways to do [...]

Read the full article →

Don’t rely on your staff’s ability to do math

April 8, 2010

I often tell folks that one of the benefits of decision management is that it enables analytic decision making – that is decisions based on accurate analysis of data about what works and what does not – even by people who don’t have any analytic skill. For instance, using analytics to assess the credit risk [...]

Read the full article →

Business rules, decision making and IT

March 30, 2010

When I blogged about Jim Sinur’s session “Business rules are king” at the Gartner BPM Summit I provoked a very thoughtful response from Tom Graves – On business rules. While Tom strongly agreed with the basic implication that organizations need discipline around business rules he identified three concerns, all of which seem to me to [...]

Read the full article →

The power of business analytics

March 24, 2010

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
I recently presented at IBM’s CIO Leadership Exchange on the power of business analytics. With 300+ of IBM’s top CIO customers this was a great event and it is clear that CIOs the world over are keen to adopt business analytics. They recognize, I believe, that they are [...]

Read the full article →

Predictive analytics – some tips

March 5, 2010

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
In a great post on 8 things to keep in mind on predictive analytics, some folks from Diamond Management & Technology laid out some things to keep in mind that I really liked. Here they are with my comments – you can get more detail on each from the series of posts [...]

Read the full article →

BI 2010 – BI and Performance Management

February 23, 2010

Continuing at BI 2010, Jon Hill spoke on the combination of BI and Performance Management. Jon reiterated the constantly changing environment and the tendency of companies to spend large amounts of money on data infrastructure without thinking through the way this investment will make a difference. In one extreme example he had seen one company [...]

Read the full article →

BI 2010 – Making BI more strategic

February 23, 2010

I have just opened ITWeb’s BI 2010 in Johannesburg talking about decisions and importance of decision making in making BI matter (I will post my slides later). Great audience, nearly 200 people with a strong showing from end user customers (75%) and, very interestingly, nearly half considered themselves business / IT straddlers which is a [...]

Read the full article →

7 Innovative uses of analytics #pawcon

February 16, 2010

Eric Siegel’s keynote focused on new and innovative uses of analytics – asking the audience to focus on their most expensive operations, their greatest operational risks, their critical operational decisions.
Predictive analytics, he says, is a business intelligence technology that produces a predictive score for each customer or prospect – something scoring their risk of fraud, [...]

Read the full article →

Decision points

February 10, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
My friend Jerome had a post this week on finding decision points – the spots in a business process where you make a decision – that was prompted by discussions he and I had with a joint client. Jerome focuses on certain kinds of activities and the words that describe them like analyze, [...]

Read the full article →

Operational decision making as a corporate asset

January 27, 2010

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
I often tell companies and other organizations that they should treat decisions and decision making as assets. In Smart (Enough) Systems, the book I wrote with Neil Raden, we said
Operational Decision Making as a Corporate Asset
If operational decisions must be made well for your organization to deliver on its strategy, they [...]

Read the full article →

Book Review – Analytics at Work

January 26, 2010

I received a pre-release copy of Tom Davenport’s new book Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results. The book is a follow-on to Competing on Analytics (reviewed here) and is a shorter, pithier book than its predecessor. Once again Tom collaborates with Jeanne Harris and this time Robert Morison of the Concours group. Where the [...]

Read the full article →

Other characteristics of decision-centric organizations

January 21, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
Decision-centric organizations also focus on automating, not just supporting, decisions. They use this focus to develop simpler, standard processes and to become more event-driven. With decisions at the forefront, organizations need to change their thinking about automation. Instead of regarding information systems as simple stores of information that people use, they need to [...]

Read the full article →

Decision-centric organizations focus on decisions

January 20, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
The first critical characteristic of a decision-centric organization, obviously enough, is a focus on decisions instead of processes or functions. The decisions an organization makes, the actions it selects from the possible alternatives are critical. Decisions are what make strategy real and drive results and performance against metrics. Implementing a strategy defined at [...]

Read the full article →