behavior

We got a quick overview of SPSS Decision Management (see my post on SPSS DM 6 or indeed the whole blog for my view of this). SPSS Decision Management combines predictive analytics, business rules and optimization/simulation to optimize high volume decisions like “should I search this car at the border” or “should I investigate this [...]

I am on a panel on “Practical Predictive Marketing” at eMetrics 2011 in New York. The panel is late in the day on Wednesday October 19th and I will be joined by Vicky Brock, Highland Business Research and Samantha Lipson, Rapp Collins Worldwide. Predicting what people are going to do is a fool’s game. But [...]

Some time ago I wrote piece about Talent Analytics. After some discussions with them I realized that my thinking about talent or HR analytics has been too limited. Sure, I have seen how it might help with the kind of recruiting, team management and merger assessments that Talent Analytics does. But Talent Analytics made the [...]

Here are 10 questions to ask about your business rules project that I developed some time ago but never ran on the blog – enjoy. What is the business decision at the heart of your project? How often is it made? What triggers it? Who makes it today? How repeatable is it? Is this decision [...]

I got a demo of the Talent Analytics platform recently. Talent Analytics is a company that develops solutions that provide relevant information to help companies anticipate the impact talent has on their business goals. Advisor, their platform, is a web-based SaaS platform. At the top level the product allows one or more organizations to be [...]

I got a briefing from Conductrics recently. Conductrics is a start up delivering an agent-based decision optimization solution focused on next best action or next best message. Designed for a website, mobile application or even a POS it uses machine learning techniques to optimize the behavior of the site/application to meet some overarching objectives – [...]

I got an update from the folks at FICO on the new release of Model Builder, their predictive analytics workbench. My last update was for Blaze Advisor 6.9 and Model Builder 7.0 and this release, Model Builder 7.1, is the first point release for Model Builder on the new 7.x platform. For those of you [...]

Bo and Lawrence from PARC presented some work on contextual intelligence research designed to exploit unstructured data for novel predictive applications. PARC is now an independent business unit focused on the Business of Breakthroughs, working with Xerox and with other companies. The new focus means they work on a wide range of problems and aim [...]

I just completed my presentation at RulesFest so here are the key points. For the RulesFest audience I assumed that either they were already using business rules or at least that they plan to be, and that  they knew what a rule engine is and how it works. Before going on to my five points, [...]

Runa was founded a couple of years ago to solve the problem of very low conversion rates on most e-commerce websites. Companies spend lots of money driving people to their websites but only 2-3% convert to buyers. One of the biggest reasons for this is shopping cart abandonment – people put goods in their cart [...]

Customer intimacy is a hot topic these days. Customers are getting more complex because not only are they using multiple channels but because they have multiple online personalities – work, home, on behalf of a parent or child and so on. The fact that consumers trust each other (78%) but not ads (13% trust for [...]

I blogged a couple of internal Oracle sessions on RTD (Oracle Real Time Decisions in e-commerce #oow10, Oracle RTD Roadmap #oow10) and now we get a chance to hear a customer speak – Dell with some help from Objectifi. Octane is Dell’s brand name for their RTD project – the platform has a number of [...]

I am attending a few sessions at Oracle OpenWorld this week and the first one is an overview of Oracle Real-Time Decisions (RTD) in e-commerce. I have reviewed RTD 3.0 before. The context for using RTD is that consumers are harder to reach, satisfy and retain – their behavior evolves more quickly, there is more [...]

Analytics means putting all your data, not just your web data, to work improving the way your web site works. It means using your historical data not for reporting but for predicting and driving new and more effective behavior across the company. It means putting all your data to work improving decision-making. This webinar will [...]

This article on CNET caught my eye this morning: Study: Smart meters need better user interface. I am always interested in smart meter stories as it has always struck me that this is a powerful way to reduce energy usage with all the long term benefits for consumers and producers this entails. I am often [...]

I did some work with Silverlink some time ago and was really impressed by their use of decision management to improve the communication of health plans and others in the healthcare space with members and patients. I got a chance to catch up with them recently to discuss progress and their use of adaptive control [...]

Meri Gruber had an interesting post on her Competing on Execution blog this week – Zappos: Make Me Happier with Business Analytics – that prompted me to want to add my own thoughts. She says: Why is Zappos only offering me help from other customers, when they are sitting on a wealth of order (and [...]

Talking with SAP today I made the comment that the best place to use business rules was often in stable, core business processes because those processes don’t change, only the decision rules within them. This clearly struck a chord with @GregChase and it made me think I should write a slightly longer version of what [...]

As organizations try to achieve agility, productivity and efficiency they often look to new technologies, new approaches to change the status quo. But when it comes to information systems, most large enterprises have an electronic backbone of legacy enterprise applications. Whether packaged or custom developed, these are “1.0” enterprise applications. Or, more bluntly, dumb applications. [...]