regulation

Business Rules, Decision Management and ASUG

May 14, 2012

I do a lot of work with companies and organizations adopting business rules and Business Rules Management Systems (BRMS) such as BRFplus and NetWeaver BRM. I wanted to share two things (as I head off to Sapphire/ASUG).
First, I often find that when organizations start with business rules they begin by just trying to capture business [...]

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IBM IMPACT Day 2 Keynotes

May 1, 2012

Johan Gerber of MasterCard kicked things off on day 2. MasterCard does not actually issue the cards with their logo on, they are a technology company that provides a network to link consumers, 32,000,000 businesses and 22,000 card issuers. The network is very high performance, handling 100 pieces of information and processing each transaction in [...]

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Real-time Infrastructure for Decision Management

April 18, 2012

It used to be that analytics were applied in batch, updating the database with a score or customer segment based on yesterday’s data.
It used to be that these models could take months to implement, so that the models themselves were based on data that might be months out of date.
It used to be that analytic [...]

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First Look – Sapiens DECISION

April 12, 2012

Sapiens has been around for over 25 years developing technology solutions around business rules and model-based development, specifically in financial services and insurance. Established in 1982 and NASDAQ traded, they have $100M in annual revenues post a couple of recent mergers. They have over 750 employees in US, Canada, UK, Japan, Australia, Belgium and Israel. [...]

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Is Machine Learning v Domain expertise the wrong question?

April 5, 2012

KDNuggets had an interesting poll this week in which readers expressed themselves as Skeptical of Machine Learning replacing Domain Expertise. This struck me not because I disagree but because I think it is in some ways the wrong question:

Any given decision is made based on a combination of information, know-how and pre-cursor decisions.
The know-how can be [...]

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Decisions, rulesets and business rules revisited

February 28, 2012

Some time back I wrote Here’s how decisions and rules relate (and how to manage them) and it seemed to me that this could do with being repeated with small updates.
One of the questions I get often is around how decisions and business rules relate. Business rules are, after all, one of the core technologies for [...]

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Here’s how a Decision Management System would manage review fraud

January 30, 2012

My eye was drawn to an article in the New York Time last week – For $2 a Star, an Online Retailer Gets 5-Star Product Reviews.  This article drew attention to the ongoing and growing problem of fake reviews. Like many of us I increasingly rely on reviews on sites like amazon.com or yelp.com to [...]

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Start with decisions not with business rules

January 4, 2012

An interesting discussion started on twitter this week with @BigBlueMilky saying “Decision Management is so much more that just using business rules” – something I strongly agree with. @JeffreyGoodReq followed up by adding “But you must start with business rules” and, when I disagreed and said you must start with Decisions added “rules = context [...]

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Giving retail banking customers what they want

January 2, 2012

Jim Davis of SAS had an interesting post back in October - What do retail banking customers want?- in which he talked about the results of some consumer surveys and the banking industry’s response. The three results Jim discussed were clarity and fairness, easy access and quality customer experience. Interestingly I see all three of these [...]

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First Look – SAS Enterprise Miner 7.1

November 11, 2011

I got an update on Enterprise Miner™ from the folks at SAS recently. Enterprise Miner is their development tool for data miners and predictive analytic specialists and is a graphical environment for designing and executing the steps in the creation of a predictive analytic model. Enterprise Miner 7.1 was part of the SAS 9.3 release [...]

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Predictive Modeling Tools for Analytic Teams #FICOWorld

November 3, 2011

The other session I got to see at FICO World was a panel discussion on analytic modeling tools with representatives from UniCredit (Italy), Ferratum (Finland), Nedbank (South Africa), and Citi.
Challenges and rewards of building an analytic modeling team

Always start from scratch with fresh, inexperienced teams and this is both challenging and rewarding
Challenges are personal and [...]

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Blaze Advisor 7 Sneak Peek First Look

September 26, 2011

I got a chance to catch up with FICO to talk about the new release of Blaze Advisor recently. FICO has  a set of decision management solutions consisting of tools (primarily the Blaze Advisor business rules management system, the Model Builder predictive analytic workbench, Decision Optimizer and the Xpress Optimization Suite), applications and analytics (scores [...]

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Decision Management Systems don’t get decision fatigue

August 18, 2011

I was recently pointed to this great NY Times article – Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? The article reports on a series of experiments to evaluate the effect of making many decisions in a row. It turns out that people don’t do well with this and that “decision fatigue” sets in, reducing not only [...]

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What, really, is the business of a mortgage broker?

July 11, 2011

Thanks to @susanliza1 I saw a tweet from @ArthurAranda of Hudson City Savings in which he said
The business of a mortgage broker is knowing numerous & complex lending rules, regulations, procedures, & policies. It is not for everyone.
Given what I do – helping companies build decision management systems – this is interesting to me. Is [...]

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Using Decision Management to make sure your agents can handle any call

May 17, 2011

I got an invite to a webinar on this topic the other day. The invite had some questions for you to ask yourself about your call center agents and how effective they would be if:

They could act the way you wanted them to every time
They didn’t have to have post-its or cheat sheets
They didn’t need [...]

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Extracting and designing a cross-channel decision in Insurance – an example

May 11, 2011

Some weeks back I wrote a series of posts on the role of Decision Management in Insurance. One post was called multi-channel distribution and customer communication and outlined how Decision Services that automate customer decisions improve customer treatment in a multi-channel world by improving their accuracy, timeliness and consistency.
The diagram at left shows how this [...]

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More on the relationship between Decision Management and BPM

May 10, 2011

There’s a great article over on IBM’s Good Decisions blog called “What’s Decision Management got to do with Business Process Management?” The article lays out a nice scenario for Decision Management and differentiates between business event processing, business rules management, analytics and business process management. It is definitely worth a read. There are a couple [...]

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Managing (and automating) scattered policies

April 21, 2011

Michael Rasmussen had a great post recently – Hordes of Policies Scattered Across the Organization – in which he had a great list of the challenges with risk management policies. Now Michael’s view of Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) is a little different than mine but he is spot on with this list of issues. [...]

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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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Decision Management and Insurance – multi-channel distribution and customer communication

February 22, 2011

Insurers face an explosion of direct sales channels: websites, mobile and call centers, with the rapidly evolving world of social media opening up even more opportunities. Driving consistent customer treatments and profitable direct sales across dynamic distribution channels, while effectively managing risk, is a huge challenge. As Deb pointed out, linking all customer communication together [...]

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