Posts tagged as:

optimization

Transforming retail with analytics and decision management

January 12, 2009

Tom Davenport has done some research into analytics and retail (reported here: Retailers recognise analytics as key to business transformation. Here’s a quote from the new item:
Retailers today are searching for ways to derive more customer intelligence, marketing savvy and operational insight from their overflowing databases. In addition to acknowledging that the use of analytics [...]

Read the full article →

Making Better Business Decisions in 2009

January 7, 2009

Tom Davenport had an interesting post for 2009 – The Year Ahead: Make Better Decisions – and it prompted me to highlight a couple of things you should definitely be planning to do in 2009.

Make a list of the key decisions that drive your business
Conduct a decision audit, or hire me to, so you know [...]

Read the full article →

It’s not AI but…

December 10, 2008

Albert Wenger had an interesting post today Human Vs. Machine 2 in which he discussed the fact that some of the old AI promises may be starting to come true. While I am not sure I 100% agree with his characterization of Netflix’s recommendation engine as AI, I do see what he means.
The over promising [...]

Read the full article →

Getting to the Right Price with Oracle Data Mining

December 2, 2008

Rachel Scales presented on Getting to the Right Price: Using BI Apps with Oracle Data Mining to Improve You Company’s Margins. Pricing is increasingly complex as the world is changing and becoming more competitive. Customer loyalties are changing, resources are constrained and competition is more global. Price management is necessary to ensure your share of [...]

Read the full article →

Live from BIWA Summit – Competing on Analytics

December 2, 2008

At the Business Intelligence Warehousing and Analytics Summit at Oracle today. BIWA is part of the Oracle User Group focused on BI, analytics and data warehousing. Jeanne Harris of Accenture (author, with Tom Davenport, of Competing on Analytics) started off the day. The subtitle of her presentation is “Building Competitive Strategies Around Data-driven Insights”.
Analytics are [...]

Read the full article →

EDM Summit – some closing thoughts

November 3, 2008

I thought I would wrap up with some closing thoughts for the week:

Lots of discussion of the importance of data – understanding it, integrating it, cleaning it and making the same data available to those reporting on it, doing analytics with it and running operational systems.
Interesting times in the rules market with recent acquisitions by [...]

Read the full article →

Hotwire.com Revenue Management

October 28, 2008

Darren Koch presented on Hotwire.com’s use of ILOG business rules in revenue management. Summary:

Ongoing segmentation and optimization help businesses serve customers
Smart testing + flexibility = better service = higher profits
Continues to show ROI that is increasing over time

Hotwire.com was founded in 1999 to help travel partners (who invested) sell excess inventory without driving down prices [...]

Read the full article →

Live from the EDM Summit – From Here to Agility

October 28, 2008

I am at the EDM Summit this week and will be blogging live from some of the sessions and posting random thoughts and comments in addition. Despite the difficult market conditions, attendance looks good with a nice full room for the keynote and attendees from 17 countries. This year’s event also has a dozen new [...]

Read the full article →

How many different kinds of decision management are there?

October 21, 2008

Well at least one more as of today – Jim Sinur, over on his Gartner blog – has finally started to use the phrase he has been threatening to use for a while “Intelligent Decision Management”. While Jim has not published a formal definition – I expect he will soon now he is back at [...]

Read the full article →

A reader asks about scorecards and why people use them

August 12, 2008

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 [...]

Read the full article →

More on the IBM/ILOG Relationship

August 11, 2008

I got a briefing last week from IBM as part of my researching of the IBM/ILOG acquisition (I blogged about this here). Back when I was at IMPACT it became clear that IBM was getting focused on events, rules and policies – they talked about Points of Agility, points in a business where variability is [...]

Read the full article →

Using decision management to deliver intelligent business performance

August 5, 2008

Steve Cranford of PwC wrote an interesting piece called Bringing Order to Chaos (brought to my attention by Alan over at Tibco) that made me think. Steve’s focus is on the next software suite for enterprises (something he calls an Intelligent Business Performance Platform) consisting of business intelligence, business process and business rules. Reading this [...]

Read the full article →

First thoughts on the IBM/ILOG announcement

July 28, 2008

I got a chance to speak with ILOG today and do some thinking so it’s time to write more about the IBM and ILOG announcement. As it is an acquisition of one publicly traded company by another neither company can legally say very much. As a result I, like everyone else, have a bunch of [...]

Read the full article →

Here’s why decisions matter to the 8 Ps of Marketing

July 7, 2008

Some time ago I saw an article that discussed the 8Ps (4 old, 4 new) of Marketing. It seemed to me that decision making, especially operational/transactional decision making is critical to most of these Ps. Here, then, is my summary of the 8Ps and why decisions, and decision management, matter.
4 Ps

Product
You might think that [...]

Read the full article →

First Look – Visual Numerics

June 27, 2008

Visual Numerics is a 100 person, privately held company that’s been around for a while – nearly 40 years – and yet is largely under the radar thanks to the size of other “analytics” companies. As the business world moves from BI to analytics it is sometimes finding that BI tools are really focused on [...]

Read the full article →

The power and challenges of decision management packages

June 8, 2008

David Greer had a cutely named post this week – The Engine That Can. David and I had a nice chat about eOptimize a few days ago and I thought I would respond to his post with some thoughts of my own. eOptimize’s product is unlike those often described as decision management applications – it [...]

Read the full article →

Lessons Learned from BPM Deployments

May 23, 2008

Ken Vollmer kicked off the last day of the event with a view from the field – a survey on BPM that Forrester did at the end of 2007. The theme is that “BPM has already achieved mainstream status inside of most enterprises but we still have a long way to go to achieve the [...]

Read the full article →

Decision Management, Operations Research and BI

May 5, 2008

I spoke to Seth Grimes last week about an article he was writing that just published on Intelligent Enterprise -What BI Practitioners Can Learn From Operations Research. As I was reading the article I also noticed a response over on Michael Trick’s OR blog -Business Intelligence and Operations Research. Both Seth’s article and Michael’s response [...]

Read the full article →

Live from InterACT – Closing Keynote

April 30, 2008

Ted Iacobuzio of TowerGroup gave the closing keynote, expanding on the survey results Fair Isaac announced today. More than 100 of the InterACT attendees took the survey – clearly this is top of mind. Some highlights:

Lenders appreciate the need for integrated customer information and multi-product decisioning
Lenders are not all at the same speed in implementation
Respondents [...]

Read the full article →

Live from InterACT – Optimal Pricing

April 29, 2008

Last full session today is Lisa Kart and Jean Zoch of Fair Isaac talking about optimal pricing – balancing profitability with competitiveness. Lisa’s focus, she says, is on what makes price optimization work. Price optimization is a very broad topic, even in financial services, but their focus is on being able to target price for [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →