Requirements

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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Documenting decisions separately from use cases

March 14, 2012

There is a nice article over on Modern Analyst on documenting decisions separately from use cases in which Mark Monteleone lays out the case for this. As he says:
I do propose making decisions visible. By visible, I mean aseparate and explicit step for each decision being made. These steps help the developer identify where possible alternate and exception [...]

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Book Review: Knowledge Automation: How to implement Decision Management in Business Processes

March 13, 2012

Some time ago I got a pre-release copy of Knowledge Automation: How to Implement Decision Management in Business Processes, Alan Fish’s new book on the analysis and design techniques of decision management. I was delighted to write a foreword for Alan and with the arrival of a printed copy I wanted to extend this with [...]

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First Look – USoft

February 14, 2012

USoft has been a vendor in the Decision Management space for a while. They started as Comtecno in 1986, become part of Unisys in 1995 then Ness Benelux in 1999 before returning to their current status as an independent Dutch software company in 2010 as USoft B.V. The software has had a much more consistent [...]

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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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