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Business Rules

Ron Ross recently posted a question “What Happens When Behavioral Business Rules and Decision Logic Collide?” in which he asks whether a behavioral rule or decision logic should “win” when they disagree. The problem is that this is the wrong question. Take his example about a city charging for its facilities. The behavioral rule is [...]

Meet us at IBM THINK this week

Ryan Trollip, CTO of Decision Management Solutions, and Charlotte DeKeyrel, one of our experienced decision modeling consultants, and I are all going to be at IBM THINK February 11th – February 14th, 2019 in San Francisco. Ryan and I are speaking on Thursday and you’ll find us at events involving Decision Management and IBM’s decisioning [...]

First Look: IBM Decision Composer

IBM has been developing Decision Composer since 2017 and is releasing it as part of its core Business Rules Management System, Operational Decision Manager, in December 2018. Decision Composer is a browser-based tool, currently available on the IBM cloud, that uses a decision model metaphor to design decision logic and deploy it as a decision [...]

We are running Jan Vanthienen’s highly reviewed, Decision Table Modeling with DMN training again December 11-13, 9:30am-11:30am Pacific each time. When representing and analyzing business decisions in real business situations and processes, decision tables have always proven a powerful approach. Decision table methodology, however, is more than putting some rules in a few tables. Hear all [...]

We are running our regularly scheduled, and highly reviewed, Decision Modeling with DMN training again December 4-6, 9:30am-11:30am Pacific each time. Decision modeling with the new Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard is fast becoming the definitive approach for building more effective processes and for specifying requirements for business rules and predictive analytic projects. With decision modeling, [...]

First Look: OpenL Tablets 5.21

EIS OpenL Tablets is a product of EIS Group focused on using a spreadsheet paradigm to manage business rules. I last spoke to OpenL Tablets in 2013 and recently got an update on the product. EIS OpenL Tablets is available as open source and in a commercial version. EIS Group is an insurance innovation company [...]

I’m a big believer in decision models using the DMN industry standard notation and Decision Management Solutions uses it on all our projects – we’ve modeled over 3,000 decisions and trained over 1,000 people. But we don’t use executable decision models very often and strongly disagree with those that say the only good decision model [...]

We are relaunching our newsletter, in a GDPR-compliant way, with a focus on DecisionsFirst Digital Transformation. We were probably GDPR-compliant before but better safe than sorry. We send emails about every 3 or 4 weeks with information about resources, events and articles on Decision Management topics. For example, case studies in digital transformation; decision modeling as a [...]

John Rymer and Mike Gualtieri of Forrester Research have just published a new piece of research – The Dawn Of Digital Decisioning: New Software Automates Immediate Insight-To-Action Cycles Crucial For Digital Business. This is a great paper – not only does it mention some Decision Management Solutions’ clients as examples, it makes some great points [...]

First Look: ACTICO Modeler 8

ACTICO has just released ACTICO Modeler 8 – the latest version of the product previously known as Visual Rules for Finance (see most recent review here). ACTICO Modeler is a project-based IDE. ACTICO users can now select whether to create a “classic” Rule Modeling project or a Decision Model and Notation (DMN) project. The DMN [...]

Jim Sinur of Aragon Research recently published a new blog Mounting Pressure for Better Decisions. He argues, correctly, that decision making is under pressure because there is more data available than ever before, a need for faster change in the way organizations make decisions to respond to evolving circumstances and a general need for speed in [...]

Maureen Fleming of IDC presented at IDC Directions on How Does Decision-Centric Computing Drive Digital Transformation? She kindly shared this presentation with me. Decision-centric computing, she says: continuously receives and analyzes data to predict when decisions need to be made, systematically learns how to automate those decisions, and acts on each decision to improve performance. [...]

Jim Sinur, VP of Research and Aragon Fellow at Aragon Research recently posted “Better Decisions with Decision Management” to his blog. Jim begins by describing Decision Management as “another discipline that will help consistently deliver better decisions”, especially when added to analytics and AI. It’s great to have Jim’s focus turn to a Decision Management [...]

Learn how to deliver data-driven claims handling decisions to maximize straight-through processing and minimize risk. I am giving a free 30? Express Webinar on March 28, 2018, 4:00 PM EST – What is a Claims Handling Pilot. A claims handling pilot delivers data-driven claims risk, fraud and wastage decisions directly into your claims process. Using real-world [...]

DecisionCAMP 2018 in in Europe – Luxembourg to be precise – September 17-19. This is a great event and well worth your time if you are interested in the nuts and bolts of decisioning technology, Decision Management or decision modeling. Last year’s event in London was great with a wide range of presentations and lots [...]

March 27-29 I am teaching a 3-part online live training class that will prepare you to be immediately effective in a modern, collaborative and DMN standards-based approach to decision modeling. You’ll learn how to identify and prioritize the decisions that drive your business, see how to analyze and model these decisions, and understand the role these decisions [...]

I have written before on how a decisions-first approach is ideal for success with AI. After reading David Roe‘s article 11 Questions Organizations need to Ask Before Buying into AI I thought a few more comments were in order: If you focus on decisions first and on how you must/could/want to make the decision, you can [...]

SAS Decision Manager is SAS’ platform for decision automation and is getting a significant update in December 2017. I wrote a product review of SAS Decision Manager in 2014 and a number of things have changed in the new release, which is on the new SAS Platform and leverages new SAS Viya technologies. SAS Decision [...]

AI is a hot topic and we get asked a lot by clients how they can succeed with AI or cognitive technology. There’s often a sense of panic – “everyone is doing AI and we’re not!” – and a sense that they have to start a completely separate initiative, throw money at it and hope [...]

I am giving a webinar on Boost Straight Through Processing in Your Claims System with Decision Automation at 10am Pacific on November 16. Register for this free webinar to see how you can automate decisions to handle more claims without manual intervention. Boost your Jet or Straight Through Processing rates to new heights to reduce costs, [...]