Requirements

Here’s how focusing on decisions aligns analytics and business

January 17, 2012

In a recent article over on All Analytics – Analytics-Business Alignment Needs Work – Beth Schultz discussed a set of Gartner predictions written up by Doug Laney. In particular she highlights Gartner’s finding that companies
cited …aligning BI initiatives with corporate strategy and objectives nearly three times as often as they called out technology-related issues
This is [...]

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Check out my Information Management Column

January 17, 2012

I have recently begun writing a column for Information Management magazine and a new one just published. The magazine is now completely online at www.information-management.com/ and you can follow their twitter feed @infomgmt. Here are my columns so far:

Requirements for Advanced Analytics
How to use decision management techniques to effectively gather the requirements for data mining and predictive [...]

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Opening Keynotes at #BBCCon11

November 1, 2011

Gladys Lam kicked if off by introducing the three chairs of the conference – Kathleen Barret Chair of IIBA who heads up the business analysis tracks, Roger Burlton of BPTrends who heads up the business process tracks and Ron Ross of BRSolutions who heads up the business rules forum tracks. The three chairs then came [...]

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Gartner BPM 11 Closing Keynote

April 29, 2011

Daryl Plummer gave the closing keynote – “If I had a time machine”. He began by differentiating between science fiction and fantasy – science fiction being a vision of the future that is based on some extrapolation of currently understood science and facts. Fantasy is completely based on the whims of the visionary. What he [...]

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10 Questions to Ask about your Business Rules Project

April 27, 2011

Here are 10 questions to ask about your business rules project that I developed some time ago but never ran on the blog – enjoy.

What is the business decision at the heart of your project?

How often is it made? What triggers it? Who makes it today? How repeatable is it?

Is this [...]

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Fiserv are looking for a Decision Management Architect

March 3, 2011

A client of mine – Fiserv in Norcross GA – is looking a Decision Management Architect. This individual will be required to:

Partner with Fiserv Business Units and 3rd parties/partners to lead and facilitate the definition of a robust & scalable technical architecture foundation for the solution that would meet business requirements and vision of the [...]

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What the business needs from business rules (a thought on mega trends)

November 9, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
Last week Carole-Ann posted on 2 MegaTrends at Business Rules Forum 2010. I normally agree with a lot of what she has to say but this time I am going to have to take exception to one of her points. Her second mega trend is that innovation has dried up in the business [...]

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Unum – Managing business rules #bbc2010

October 19, 2010

Subtitled “from 0 to 1400″, this case study discussed how Unum (an insurance company) introduced business rules. Back in 2009 their rules were scattered, siloed, hidden in requirements documents and in different formats (from code to if/then statements to long verbose notes). And even though they tried to focus on rules, [...]

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Gathering BI/DW requirements

August 24, 2010

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
There was a great article this week over on the Requirements Network – Data Warehouse / Business Intelligence Requirements Elicitation. Where do You Begin? I really liked the fact that early in the discussion the author said:
After establishing these strategic objectives, make it a priority to get your users [...]

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Use Cases and Business Rules

August 18, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
Barb von Halle and Larry Goldberg had an interesting article titled Use Cases and Business Rules – can they work together over on Modern Analyst. In the article they discuss the role of the Decision Model and business rules in use cases.
They make some good points and I have [...]

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Decision requirements diagram – a neat idea

December 9, 2009

Alan fish has started a blog on decision requirements and recently blogged on The Decision Requirements Diagram. If you are doing business rules or analytics, or better yet decision management, read this now. Fabulous, if straightforward and “obvious”, this is a diagram you should be using. I certainly plan to.

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Webinar: The Decision Model – Empowering Decision Management

September 24, 2009

[ October 21, 2009; 10:00 am to 11:00 am. ] The fourth webinar in the series. In order to implement Decision Management effectively, we need to be able to identify and manage the business logic (i.e. the business rules) underlying business decisions. It soon becomes apparent that classical methods of gathering and managing business rules (i.e. by natural language) do not scale to support Decision [...]

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Book Review – Principles of the Business Rule Approach

August 1, 2009

Principles of the Business Rule Approach by Ron Ross
This book is one of the classics on business rules from one of the most long-standing authors in the area, Ron Ross. The book is a little more than three years old but, as it is not really focused on technology for managing business rules so much [...]

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A reader asks – how to document decision logic

April 9, 2009

I got an interesting question last week:
In you experience do you believe that the rules editors will become self documenting tools and, if so, is there any danger to this?
With regard to products I have used in the past I am not convinced they have evolved sufficiently to do this and I always see users [...]

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RuleSpeak – some useful guidelines for writing rules

April 9, 2009

The folks at BR Solutions launched a new website that makes some of the RuleSpeak guideliness for writing good rules available for download at www.RuleSpeak.com. It offers basic RuleSpeak 2.0 guidelines in English, Spanish, German and (soon) Dutch. Ron Ross wrote an article about this in the April issue of the Business Rules Journal eUpdate.
I [...]

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Keeping business rules out of your use cases with decisions

April 2, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
Adrian Marchis had a nice article on Use Case Recycling by Extracting Business Rules. Now making sure decisions are identified explicitly in use cases avoids one of the seven deadly sins of decision management and is something I think is critical. Indeed I wrote an article on the topic on the same network [...]

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First Look – RuleXpress

March 2, 2009

RuleXpress is a tool from RuleArts designed to allow business analysts to capture their vocabulary or terms and source business rules relevant to their business and their business problems. RuleXpress is not a business rules management system nor is it a modeling tool in the sense of a UML modeling tool. It is a tool [...]

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Decision Management and software development II – Model Driven Engineering

February 13, 2009

Continuing this weeks posts on using decision management to improve development,  I thought I would post on how decision management should be part of model-driven development (model-driven engineering, a model-driven architecture or whatever).
The recent, and premature, discussion of the death of SOA led Johan den Haan to post SOA is dead; long live Model-Driven SOA [...]

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Using Decision Management to improve Requirements

February 9, 2009

I just wrote an article for Modern Analyst – Using Decision Management to improve Requirements. The whole area of requirements and business rules/decision management is one I think is deserving of more attention. Just as Agile developers need to think about using rules/decision management so do those specifying requirements. We know the old approaches (rules [...]

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DIALOG The roadmap

February 4, 2009

On now to the roadmap, at least at a high level.
Right now there is the normal post-acquisition “blue wash” going on and by Q2 will deliver IBM versions of all ILOG’s products and, obviously IBM’s global sales force and Global Services are being spun up. The core of the roadmap is to move the BRMS [...]

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