agility

A new white paper is posted to Decision Management Solutions company site, “Maximizing the Value of Business Rules – Decision Management streamlines and focuses business rules projects for faster, more effective deployment“. Summary: Business rules management systems deliver on the promise of costs savings, agility and happy customers. Yet for many companies, business rules efforts remain point [...]

Tomorrow, May 5th, at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern I am giving a free webinar on “Increasing BPM agility and effectiveness with Decision Management”. Combining BPM with Decision Management results in simpler, more agile processes and increases straight through processing and operational effectiveness. I will cover how combining Decision Management with BPM: Delivers simpler, more agile business [...]

A new white paper is up on Decision Management Solutions company site, “The Decisions at the Heart of Your Processes – How Decision Management simplifies business processes and improves results.” It is a companion paper to the workshop I gave last week at Gartner BPM 2011. Summary: Companies applying Business Process Management can create simpler and [...]

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 [...]

Bill Gassman spoke on the role of Business Intelligence – BI – in process improvement. Bill means “big BI” – everything to do with intelligence about your business, the discipline of BI and analytics, not just a “BI” product. The road to intelligent operations he says has “haves” and “have nots” – some have BI [...]

Janelle Hill talked about the BPM Scenario and the role of BPM in creating intelligent operations. She had three things to cover – why is BPM more important than ever, business optimization and where to go next. First, she reminded us of some key elements of BPM from Gartner’s perspective: BPM involves a focus on [...]

Roy Schulte of Gartner gave a rapid fire session on business rules. Business rules he says can be used in multiple ways in a Business Process Management context. It can be used to make applications smarter and more flexible by externalizing rules. You can also use them to control process flow. And you can use [...]

On May 5th at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern I am giving a free webinar on “Increasing BPM agility and effectiveness with Decision Management”. Combining BPM with Decision Management results in simpler, more agile processes and increases straight through processing and operational effectiveness. Decision Management delivers a shared  framework for cross-functional business and IT collaboration creating game-changing [...]

Three folks from Nationwide Insurance introduced their ILOG business rules implementation. Nationwide is one of the largest insurance and financial services companies with multiple brands offering products in property and casualty, mortgages, lines of credit, retirement plans and more. They are 124 on the Fortune 500, 16M policies and 32,000 staff. This project focused on [...]

Steve Mills kicked off day 2 to talk about the kind of IT architecture that supports business agility. Your IT architecture, he says, must enable business processes run reliably and securely across application silos. Business must own their processes and their data, not have them be subsumed into siloed packaged applications. IT must enable these [...]

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 [...]

Nancy Pearson and David Farrell kicked off the main event. 8,000 people at IBM IMPACT apparently and Nancy introduced the key themes – helping companies optimize for growth and focus on delivering results. The topics are based on a continued focus on getting business and IT to work together (a key theme of Decision Management [...]

I gave a webinar on Smarter ERP with Decision Management and one of the tweets during the presentation – “Standard processes, custom decisions” prompted a few requests for more details. So, here goes. When I talk to companies about their ERP implementations we often end up discussing the balance between standardization/globalization and flexibility/localization. These companies [...]

Strategy Meets Actions’ research reports that insurers have tens, hundreds, even thousands of initiatives. To achieve these goals, aligning the business and IT is critical, as is setting the right priorities, and ensuring technology investments support these priorities. Decision Management focuses on the key business decisions, and moves away from a focus on functional processes [...]

Insurers face huge challenges with their installed base of legacy mainframe applications.  Many systems are 15-20 years old and are impeding insurers’ ability to respond to the market demands for new products and to the increased rate of consumerization. Maintenance costs are high and staffing challenges continue to mount. Growing consumer buying power will force [...]

Many organizations’ agility and responsiveness is hamstrung by their legacy systems. Replacing them wholesale is impossible but the constraint they impose on the business is unacceptable. In this session I will show how you can use Decision Management and business rules to avoid replacing the whole application while still maximizing agility and improving business alignment. [...]

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 [...]

I am presenting at an IBM/Information Week webinar What, exactly, do you mean by business rules on December 9th. I will try to clear up the confusion between rules and decisions, explaining why this distinction is critical if you expect to incorporate improved agility into your organization’s ability to respond to market demands, competitive actions [...]

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, they were often embedded [...]