optimization

Business Rules Forum Presentation: Begin with the Decision in Mind

May 17, 2011

[ November 2, 2011; 11:00 am to 12:00 pm. ] I am giving a cross-track presentation on Beginning with the Decision in Mind at the Building Business Capability event in Florida November 2 at 2pm Eastern.

Years of working with business rules and other decisioning technologies from business intelligence to predictive analytics and optimization has made one thing clear – technologies alone are not the answer. [...]

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eMetrics Panel: Practical Predictive Marketing

May 17, 2011

[ October 19, 2011; 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm. ] I am on a panel on “Practical Predictive Marketing” at eMetrics 2011 in New York. The panel is late in the day on Wednesday October 19th and I will be joined by Vicky Brock, Highland Business Research and Samantha Lipson, Rapp Collins Worldwide.

Predicting what people are going to do is a fool’s game. But [...]

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First Look – OpenRules Rule Solver and Rule Learner

May 12, 2011

I recently published a First Look on the open source OpenRules Decision Management System. Along with traditional Business Rules components, OpenRules includes two other important decision management components:

Rules Solver for solving optimization problems
Rule Learner for predictive analytics.

OpenRules Rule Solver is based on Constraint Programming (CP) [...]

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The BPM Scenario

April 29, 2011

Janelle Hill talked about the BPM Scenario and the role of BPM in creating intelligent operations. She had three things to cover – why is BPM more important than ever, business optimization and where to go next.
First, she reminded us of some key elements of BPM from Gartner’s perspective:

BPM involves a focus on processes as [...]

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Rapid Fire Business Rules at Gartner BPM

April 28, 2011

Roy Schulte of Gartner gave a rapid fire session on business rules. Business rules he says can be used in multiple ways in a Business Process Management context. It can be used to make applications smarter and more flexible by externalizing rules. You can also use them to control process flow. And you can use [...]

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First Look – Drools Planner

April 13, 2011

Drools Planner is a sub project of the Drools project that started 4 years ago as Drools Solver. Drools Planner is focused on “NP complete” planning problems where a solution is hard to find, but easy to prove feasible once found. Examples include scheduling, bin packing and timetabling for instance. Drools Planner is particularly good [...]

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IBM IMPACT 2011 Day 2 Keynotes

April 12, 2011

Steve Mills kicked off day 2 to talk about the kind of IT architecture that supports business agility. Your IT architecture, he says, must enable business processes run reliably and securely across application silos. Business must own their processes and their data, not have them be subsumed into siloed packaged applications. IT must enable these [...]

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First Look – SAS/OR

March 31, 2011

I have been doing more thinking about optimization recently and thought I should get caught up with the OR (Operations Research) folks at SAS to see what they are doing. They see OR technologies as part of the overall analytics spectrum and feel that anything that improves the rigor of decision making without unduly constraining [...]

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OpenRules and Decision Modeling

March 23, 2011

Jacob Feldman presented to the Object Management Group Decision Modeling Notation meeting on OpenRules – an open source “decision management system”. Jacob argues that OpenRules is a Decision Management System for a number of reasons – besides having a rule engine and a rule engine it also supports automated rule discovery, predictive analytics, an optimization [...]

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SAS product portfolio and roadmaps

March 7, 2011

Warning, long post follows – SAS has a lot of products and even this summary was a lot. A big session on the product portfolio – 2010 and 2011 highlights in some specific focus areas. New releases in 2010 included:

Customer Link Analytics – released in Q1 this product focused on using links between customers to [...]

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SAS Vertical Strategy

March 7, 2011

Focus of the presentation from Russ Cobb was Banking, Insurance, Retail and Government.
Banking first. Lots of releases this year primarily around Enterprise Risk Management, Governance Risk Compliance, Customer intelligence, fraud and financial crime solutions. Key customer issues for SAS in banking:

Customer Growth
How do you identify, grow and manage your most profitable customers. Big focus for [...]

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First Look – Opera Solutions

March 3, 2011

I got a chance to catch up with Opera Solutions recently. A company that aims to improve “machine intelligence” and couple it with human insight to help companies with sustained profit growth, Opera has 400 staff worldwide with over 125 analytic scientists. This makes it a very large analytic solutions provider in a market dominated [...]

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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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Decision Management and Insurance – Business Optimization and Governance

February 24, 2011

Strategy Meets Actions’ research reports that insurers have tens, hundreds, even thousands of initiatives. To achieve these goals, aligning the business and IT is critical, as is setting the right priorities, and ensuring technology investments support these priorities.
Decision Management focuses on the key business decisions, and moves away from a focus on functional processes and [...]

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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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First Look – Tibco Spotfire

February 15, 2011

I got an update from TIBCO Spotfire recently, with my usual focus on operational decisions. Spotfire aim at what they call the analysis gap. Their customers typically have applications that are tailored and customized but too expensive to change, reporting that is widely distributed but inefficient (prompting users to use additional tools when needs change) [...]

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First Look – SAS Customer Intelligence

January 4, 2011

I got a quick update from the customer intelligence folks at SAS recently. Customer Intelligence is SAS’ largest solution line (with dedicated sales, marketing and engineering) and they are projecting to have a record year in 2010. SAS describes their SAS  Customer Intelligence Suite as providing three core benefits for organizations, each based on a [...]

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First Look – Portrait Software

October 19, 2010

Portrait Software, now part of Pitney Bowes Business Insight – has a tag line of “Make every interaction count” so, with my focus on micro decisions, I wanted to get an update. Since the early days of Quadstone (acquired by Portrait some years ago) the focus of this team has been to help people get [...]

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First Look – in2clouds

September 29, 2010

in2clouds is focused on helping companies use Predictive Analytics to improve their business performance. Founded by MicroStrategy alumni and launched in 2009, in2clouds is a small company that has been working in hi-tech, financial services and retail. Seeing analytics as “the next big thing” they want to reduce the friction for mainstream adoption and help [...]

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Decision Management – aligning strategy and operations #bas2010

September 29, 2010

The folks from SPSS and ILOG presented on Decision Management – Aligning Organizational Strategy with Day-to-Day Operations. I have blogged before about SPSS Decision Management and Modeler products. Before acquiring SPSS, IBM talked about the move towards optimizing decisions – replacing sense and respond with predict and act, becoming more fact-driven in real-time and driving [...]

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