Decision Management

The speed, volume and complexity of decisions – as well as the impact they have on customer experience – demand automated, real-time decision making. Digital decisioning is an emerging best practice for delivering business impact from AI, machine learning, and analytics. Digital decisioning is an approach that ensures your systems act intelligently on your behalf, [...]

Next Session November 18-20, 2019Three 2-hour sessions with homework.12:30 pm – 2:30 pm ET Decision modeling with the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard is fast becoming the definitive approach for sustained business engagement, improved traceability and flexible and analytic enterprise applications. With decision modeling, you can: Re-use, evolve, and manage business rules.Effectively frame the [...]

McKinsey recently reported that “Most carriers are struggling to meet their cost of capital, and productivity has barely moved over the past decade” and that “The insurance industry is facing a serious structural challenge … the majority of carriers are not making their cost of capital.” Growing productivity by improving operations is an essential ingredient [...]

In January of this year, Wired Magazine published an article about a collaboration between The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)  and Google parent Alphabet’s DeepMind unit to create software powered by artificial intelligence that attempts to predict which patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) are likely to develop acute kidney injury (AKI). The article [...]

In May, 2019 the analytics community lost a true pioneer. I met Robert Hecht-Nielsen in 2001 when the company he co-founded, HNC Software, purchased the Blaze Advisor business unit of Brokat Technology, where I worked. The following year, HNC Software was acquired by the company now known as FICO. He was well known to all [...]

One of the key benefits of decision management is its focus on operational decisions. Diving into these operational decisions further, you can typically identify several micro-decisions that, when improved, will dramatically affect business performance. “Micro-decisions” are the decisions made transaction by transaction, customer by customer. Companies often fail to recognize these as individual decisions, instead [...]

Like many of you I am awash in digital photos and have been trying to find a good way to manage them. For various reasons I picked Amazon Photos. One of the key benefits was the family vault – a way to let several people upload photos to a shared space. Of course, another reason [...]

I noticed the other day that my phone, which used to have a relatively sophisticated (if horribly complicated) “do not disturb” approach had reverted to only allowing a simple version. Online, many users complain that now they can’t really use it because it’s too “dumb” regarding when it rings and when it doesn’t. How did [...]

I recently wrote a blog over on Decision Management Solutions’ blog called 5 Reasons to fire your rules consultant to highlight the worst offences of business rules consultants. Here’s the list: They want to do rule harvesting They call it a rule engine They put off business user enablement to phase 2 They smush process [...]

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 [...]

I am speaking with Ryan Trollip, CTO of Decision Management Solutions, and Stephane Mery of IBM on Delivering Excellent Customer Experiences with Analytics and Automation at IBM THINK. Many customers are struggling to deliver consistent digital experiences across customer channels and touch points. Adopting a decision-first approach is a step in the right direction to [...]

I have known Tom for many years and enjoyed his books. He recently sent me a copy of his latest one – The AI Advantage: How to Put the Artificial Intelligence Revolution to Work (Management on the Cutting Edge). Tom does his usual excellent job of introducing a technical topic – AI and machine learning [...]

We’ve blogged recently about some of the challenges in analytics and AI – How More Companies Can Maximize the Potential of Analytics and 80% of insurance carriers aren’t delivering high impact analytics – building on some great McKinsey research. They recently published another article, this time targeted at Chief Analytics Officers – Rebooting analytics leadership: Time to move beyond the [...]

Recently we have posted on the Decision Management Solutions blog about a couple of interesting pieces of McKinsey research that discuss the unfortunate truth – most companies are NOT succeeding with advanced analytics. First, there’s this general research How More Companies Can Maximize the Potential of Analytics: “Senior executives tell [McKinsey] that their companies are struggling to [...]

Frontline Solvers has been in business for over 25 years and focused on democratizing analytics for the last five years. They identify themselves as an alternative to analytic complexity with a focus on leveraging broadly held Excel skills and a large base of trained students. They offer several products for predictive and prescriptive analytics and [...]

Cassie Kozyrkov, the Chief Decision Intelligence Engineer at Google wrote an article recently titled  Is your AI project a nonstarter in which she identified 22 check list items for a candidate AI project. It’s a great article and you should definitely read it. In particular you should note the quote at the top: Don’t waste [...]

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, [...]