I was chatting with our VP of business development today and she shared a great phrase that she had heard recently – “the tyranny of the anecdotal.” This refers, of course, to the terrible tendency of people to use anecdotes and stories to make decisions. The regrettable tendency for a doctor to ignore data about [...]
analysis
I am often asked about the difference between decision support systems and decision management systems. This is an interesting topic and one that is central to the value proposition of decision management systems so I thought I would revisit it. All decisions involve a choice, a selection of a course of action from a set [...]
Big Data is a big topic these days. The combination of predictive analytics and Big Data should create new opportunities for more specific, future-oriented analysis of large amounts of data to create actionable insight. Yet most organizations are not combining predictive analytics and Big Data in this way and I think this is because they are trying [...]
FICO Xpress Optimization Suite is part of the FICO Decision Management tools suite. It can be used in conjunction with various FICO applications too. It is used directly with their Marketing product and is embedded in their Decision Optimizer product that can generate optimal rules for their Originations, Customer Management, Collections and Fraud products. Outside [...]
3. It will take too long to get results This excuse gets trotted out for one of two reasons – either the organization feels it is just too busy to take on something new or someone has heard that the technology requires a large up-front investment in time. Let’s take these one at a time. [...]
KDNuggets had an interesting poll this week in which readers expressed themselves as Skeptical of Machine Learning replacing Domain Expertise. This struck me not because I disagree but because I think it is in some ways the wrong question: Any given decision is made based on a combination of information, know-how and pre-cursor decisions. The know-how [...]
Pervasive is best known for its data integration products but has recently been developing and releasing a series of products focused on analytics. RushAnalyzer is a combination of the KNIME data mining workbench (reviewed here) and Pervasive DataRush, a platform for parallelization and automatic scaling of data manipulation and analysis (reviewed here). In the combined [...]
Rapid Insight was founded 10 years ago to develop tools that were easier for analysts to use to quickly extract meaning from data. Rapid Insight has been focused in higher education until recently and is expanding into fund raising and other areas. Rapid Insight Analytics is a pure data mining or predictive analytic workbench designed [...]
Rapid-I provides open source software for predictive analytics, data mining and text mining. Incorporated in 2006, they are based in Dortmund Germany and have been working on RapidMiner since 2001. They have over 35,000 production deployments and more than 400 customers in 40 countries. Banking and financial services is their largest market followed by Pharma [...]
Session 2420 at IBM’s IMPACT is titled “From Business Rules to a Decision-Centric Organization” and is being presented jointly by me and a client of mine – Gagan Saxena of Apple Vacations. Apple Vacations is expanding its B2C business by improving consumer experience, adding intelligent personalization and dynamically creating product packages – a dramatic shift [...]
Brenda Dietrich from IBM research wrapped up the morning with a discussion of some of IBM’s research. This involved both managing uncertain data at scale and driving analytics for this data. Projects cover systems of people, the future Watson, Outcome-based business and resilient business and services. As everyone knows there’s a lot more data out [...]
Steve Mills kicked off the IBM Smarter Analytics Leadership Summit. Business Analytics matter, he says, as shown by the focus of CEOs (8 out of 10 expect complexity to increase, enterprises applying analytics are more successful etc). The need for analytics is pervasive, with every industry seeing a massive expansion in the volume of data [...]
As you probably know by now, we have released the first version of our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology report. This report is available free for download from http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology. This version of the report focuses on four key areas (outlined in the webinar we gave recently and available in our archive here). One of these [...]
We recently released the first version of our Decision Management Systems Platform Technology report. This report is available free for download from http://www.decisionmanagementsolutions.com/decision-management-technology. This version of the report focuses on four key areas (outlined in the webinar we gave recently and available in our archive here). One of these areas is embedding predictive analytics. For [...]
Some time ago I got a pre-release copy of Knowledge Automation: How to Implement Decision Management in Business Processes, Alan Fish’s new book on the analysis and design techniques of decision management. I was delighted to write a foreword for Alan and with the arrival of a printed copy I wanted to extend this with [...]
Dymatrix started in 2000 as a spinout from Computer Sciences Corporation. Focused on analytical CRM and campaign management they have done many projects and identified a number of challenges in the use of predictive analytic models. They have customers across utilities, retail, telecommunications, banking, insurance and life sciences. This work led to the development of [...]
Some time back I wrote Here’s how decisions and rules relate (and how to manage them) and it seemed to me that this could do with being repeated with small updates. One of the questions I get often is around how decisions and business rules relate. Business rules are, after all, one of the core technologies [...]
Four themes in business visualization: Consumer-oriented BI Walk up and use, understanding through visualization, self-service Deriving value from big data Analytics and visualization that scales with in-memory Approachable analytics Integration into the user’s world Outlook, Office, mobile The new product (coming in March) has four components: Environment Manager for setup and monitoring Visual Analytics Explorer for [...]
High Performance Analytics first. As already noted this is a key focus area for SAS. The three pillars, remember, are: Grid Computing Allocating out analytic tasks to multiple processors and cores in a managed fashion. In-Database Analytics Using database servers for analytic computing to minimize data movement and improve performance. In-Memory Analytics The key area [...]
Dr Goodnight kicked it off the executive viewpoint at the 2012 SAS Inside Intelligence session. SAS had another growth year in 2011 ($2.7B and growth of 12.1%) as Jim highlighted both its continued investment in new buildings around the world and the fact that many SAS locations around the world, and SAS overall, continue to [...]
