Smart (Enough) Systems

Predictive Analytics World Workshop: Driving Enterprise Decisions with Business Analytics

May 17, 2011

[ October 18, 2011; 6:00 am to 1:30 pm. ] I am giving a workshop on Driving Enterprise Decisions with Business Analytics at Predictive Analytics World in New York all day on Tuesday October 18th.

Putting business analytics to work is top of mind for organizations like yours. Business agility and operational responsiveness are more important than ever. There is a real opportunity to use analytics [...]

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Decision Management: Orchestrating Consistent Enterprise-Wide Decisions

April 11, 2011

As companies move to this more changeable, uncertain world that requires a coordinate extended enterprise, it is essential to manage decisions as well as processes – not by using process management to manage decisions but by managing decisions alongside processes. These operational decisions – micro decisions – are the front line in driving business agility [...]

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Decision Management and Insurance – Putting the Data To Work

February 15, 2011

At the core of the Top 10 Imperatives for Insurers is putting the data to work – across channels, in day-to-day operations, in customer interactions and more.  Putting data to work means leveraging the historical data you have about your operations, performance and policy holders to systematically increase the value of your corporate decision assets. [...]

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IDC: Decision Management Market at $10B by 2014

January 18, 2011

The folks at IDC (Dan Vesset, Maureen Fleming, Steve Hendrick, Henry Morris and others) have just released Worldwide Decision Management Software 2010–2014 Forecast: A Fast-Growing Opportunity to Drive the Intelligent Economy – the first ever market sizing for “Decision Management”. This is exciting – it’s great to have a leading research organization like IDC pull [...]

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Here’s how to put strategic thinking into action

January 6, 2011

I was reading this article on Have you tested your strategy lately? in the McKinsey Quarterly and I was struck by test 10: Have you translated your strategy into an action plan?
This struck me because one of the most persistent problems I see in corporate strategy is what I call the “make it so” problem. [...]

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Business rules, accelerating change and Decision Management

January 4, 2011

Randy Heffner had a post late last year that I just got to – Business 2011 Gets Faster; Business Rules And SOA Policy Get More Important. Randy makes the key point that while the pace of change means you cannot afford to lock up your business logic in traditional code, you also can’t just let [...]

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Elements of Business Analytics

November 17, 2010

Syndicated from IIA
My friends at SAS, a sponsor of IIA, have a nice piece on their Knowledge Exchange – Elements of a Business Analytics Framework for IT. This lays out their view on the different kinds of decision types and maps them to decision frequency. Both in Smart (Enough) Systems and in my blog posts [...]

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Predixion, Zementis and Lyzasoft

October 26, 2010

Interesting announcements last week from three companies I have reviewed recently – Predixion, Zementis and Lyzasoft. Predixion has developed some interesting cloud-based predictive analytic technology – tools to load data from Excel and build predictive models from it – while Lyzasoft has a nice collaborative business intelligence environment and [...]

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Oracle RTD Roadmap #oow10

September 20, 2010

The Oracle Real Time Decisions (RTD) roadmap began with a quick review of Oracle RTD (see my earlier post on the role of RTD in e-commerce) – an analytical decision service that sits between the operational and analytic applications of an organization so that operational business processes can be analytically enhanced. Crucially it combines prescriptive [...]

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Decisions, decision management and analytics

July 29, 2010

Syndicated from International Institute for Analytics

Tom Davenport was interview recently by the Sloan Business Review on Reengineering your decision making processes about analytics and how companies make decisions. While the interview is mostly focused on manual decision making, many of the points are just as valid when you consider decision management and decisioning technology as [...]

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Smart meters need smart systems, not a better user interface

May 19, 2010

This article on CNET caught my eye this morning: Study: Smart meters need better user interface. I am always interested in smart meter stories as it has always struck me that this is a powerful way to reduce energy usage with all the long term benefits for consumers and producers this entails. I am often [...]

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Teradata Active Enterprise Intelligence

April 28, 2010

Dave Schrader presented on 3 years of Active Enterprise Intelligence progress, giving the same presentation he uses to talk to customers, especially business customers. He has been showing customers that their peers have been adopting Active Enterprise Intelligence (some 146 case studies) and discussing some of the challenges (which are people problems, of course).
Active Enterprise [...]

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Business rules, decision making and IT

March 30, 2010

When I blogged about Jim Sinur’s session “Business rules are king” at the Gartner BPM Summit I provoked a very thoughtful response from Tom Graves – On business rules. While Tom strongly agreed with the basic implication that organizations need discipline around business rules he identified three concerns, all of which seem to me to [...]

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In-database analytics – a white paper

February 25, 2010

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
My co-author on Smart (Enough) Systems, Neil Raden, has written a great white paper on in-database analytics that is available from Sybase – Analytics from the start. This paper introduces the key concepts, discusses some of the key issues (our book contains more tips in this area) and describes some strong case examples. [...]

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Great interview with Deepak Advani of IBM

February 24, 2010

Doug Henschen has a great interview with Deepak Advani of IBM, the new head of IBM’s newly acquired SPSS business (and I am not just saying that because he mentions Smart (Enough) Systems).  I am looking forward to seeing what IBM does with the combination of ILOG and SPSS, along with InfoSphere, WebSphere, FileNet and [...]

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Decision points

February 10, 2010

Syndicated from ebizQ
My friend Jerome had a post this week on finding decision points – the spots in a business process where you make a decision – that was prompted by discussions he and I had with a joint client. Jerome focuses on certain kinds of activities and the words that describe them like analyze, [...]

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Operational decision making as a corporate asset

January 27, 2010

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
I often tell companies and other organizations that they should treat decisions and decision making as assets. In Smart (Enough) Systems, the book I wrote with Neil Raden, we said
Operational Decision Making as a Corporate Asset
If operational decisions must be made well for your organization to deliver on its strategy, they [...]

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Where to start with analytics?

January 6, 2010

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork
One of my google alerts pointed me to this thread on Oracle’s discussion forums OTN Discussion Forums : Text Mining Dictionary …. I got the alert because one of friends at Oracle responded to the question “Where to Start?” by quoting the book (Smart (Enough) Systems) I wrote with Neil Raden:
Wrong: Catalog everything [...]

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Smart systems in business

December 22, 2009

Syndicated from ebizQ
K. Mani Chandy is one of my fellow bloggers on ebizQ and his first post had a title that caught my eye – Smart Systems in Business: A Biological Metaphor. Given my focus on decisions to make smarter systems (or, as Neil and I put it in our book, Smart (Enough) Systems) I [...]

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Make Better Decisions

November 17, 2009

Tom Davenport published a new article recently in the Harvard Business Review titled Make Better Decisions. In it he gives some examples of bad decisions and asks why this decision-making disorder?
First, because decisions have generally been viewed as the prerogative of individuals—usually senior executives. The process employed, the information used, the logic relied on, have [...]

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