JT on EDM

I am speaking at the Brainstorm conference in San Francisco and blogging a couple of sesssions. First up today is Michael Melenovsky (formerly of Gartner) on Accelerating BPM Adoption – creating a vision and establishing a roadmap. Michael made the great point that companies sometimes get started with BPM to try it out and then [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ
Gary Comerford posted about Bex Huff’s identification of How one bad business process doomed GM. Like Gary I appreciated the analysis. However, the title is all wrong. This is not about a business process – I am prepared to bet that GM’s PROCESS for selecting and acquiring parts, signing up vendors etc was [...]

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective
Arthur Hughes (author of Strategic Database Marketing) and Anna Lu of e-Dialog.com presented on predictive modeling for e-mail marketing. Arthur has been developing databases for database marketing for 30 years or so. Initially he focused on databases but found that people could not use them to make money and that led [...]

Dan Rosanova wrote a piece on The SOA Knowledge Gap that made me think (again) about the value of business rules as a way to manage requirements. Dan points out that

“A unique SOA challenge is its need to bring together SMEs from across the enterprise.”

Now this is true but I don’t believe that better management of requirements is the answer. In fact what is needed is a way to turn what the SMEs know into something that can be managed in a repository and used to power systems directly. Working with SMEs to create sets of business rules to represent their know-how not only allows this knowledge to be stored in an executable format – reducing the likelihood of implementation error and speeding deployment and maintenance – it also allows each SME or SME group to manage their own rules. A modern Business Rules Management System (BRMS) will allow different users to have different access to rule sets, allowing each set of rules to be managed by those who know them best or those who “own” them. The BRMS can then be used to package up the relevant rules – typically many sets from many SMEs – into a decision service that can be deployed into a service-oriented architecture.
Because the SME’s can edit the rules directly, business agility is increased because the time from the SME realizing that a change is needed to the time when that change is deployed can be cut dramatically using the rule management features of a typical BRMS.
Dan’s comments about how to gather the know-how from SMEs are all good, but gathering their know how as requirements and not rules is going to limit the good it can do. I have blogged a lot on this topic but check out these two posts on the difference between requirements and Requirements and on how to fit business rules into a software development lifecycle.

A panel of the keynote presenters discussed critical success factors for BI and analytics. Panels are tricky to blog so this is just going to be a list of thoughts generated by the panelists with no attempt to assign them to the individuals. Critical success factors, then, include:

You must understand what drives high performance for [...]

An old friend sent me a link to an article on the Financial Times – How to survive an IT squeeze. I was struck by a couple of quotes:
Scarcity of capital will generate increased competition for the cash that is available. Consequently it will be even more important that businesses do everything they can to [...]

I was chatting with someone the other day who shared a story of a European health insurer.   Their decision-making in claims looked only at the validity of the claim and nothing else. This of course created a situation where good (and very profitable customers) could be treated correctly but ineffectively – such as one [...]

My friend Kurt Schlegel at Gartner has just released a new report – Deliver Business Value With a BICC (BI Competency Center) Focused on Decision Making. In it he “identifies the steps required to evolve business intelligence (BI) beyond reporting measures, to making great decisions”. Like Kurt I believe that “Tying BI to the decision [...]

Mitch Betts’ blog brought an interesting article to my attention this week – an interview Accenture chief scientist Kishore Swaminathan in which he argues that CIOs need to move up the value chain and become Chief Intelligence Officers. I kinda like this but I would not equate being a Chief Intelligence Officer with data but [...]

Analytics simplify data to amplify its value
This was a phrase I remember from my friends in the Fair Isaac R&D team. I have no idea if this is original or a well-known analytic quote but I like it. Think about it, most business users would say they want usable, actionable information not just data so [...]