Dave Schrader presented on 3 years of Active Enterprise Intelligence progress, giving the same presentation he uses to talk to customers, especially business customers. He has been showing customers that their peers have been adopting Active Enterprise Intelligence (some 146 case studies) and discussing some of the challenges (which are people problems, of course). Active [...]
competing on analytics
I got a chance to catch up with Russ Cobb, Vice President, Alliances and Product Marketing at SAS about the SAS/Accenture announcement recently. One of the first questions, of course, is whether this was just a “Barney” relationship (I love you, you love me) or if it had any meat. Russ understood completely and said [...]
Accenture and SAS announced today that they will jointly create an analytics group focused on financial services, healthcare and public service. They describe this as a “significant evolution of the existing relationship between the two companies”. The release is at http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/AccentureSASAnalyticsGroup.html This is obviously an interesting announcement. Ever since IBM announced its new Business Analytics [...]
I received a pre-release copy of Tom Davenport’s new book Analytics at Work: Smarter Decisions, Better Results. The book is a follow-on to Competing on Analytics (reviewed here) and is a shorter, pithier book than its predecessor. Once again Tom collaborates with Jeanne Harris and this time Robert Morison of the Concours group. Where the [...]
Tom Davenport published a new article recently in the Harvard Business Review titled Make Better Decisions. In it he gives some examples of bad decisions and asks why this decision-making disorder? First, because decisions have generally been viewed as the prerogative of individuals—usually senior executives. The process employed, the information used, the logic relied on, [...]
Malcolm Gladwell, Thornton May (author of The New Know: Innovation Powered by Analytics)and Tom Davenport (author of Competing on Analytics, reviewed here) made up a high powered panel for this. Various random comments follow: Healthcare is being used as an example by the panel as an obvious point where analytics and expertise intersect. There is [...]
ILOG and XM presented on optimization and business processes. Optimization in this context is about mathematical optimization aimed at decision support or Operations Research. Creating plans and schedules to optimize use of resources. Optimization helps business create best possible schedules or plans, explore their alternatives and understand trade-offs between conflicting goals. For instance, how much [...]
Doug Henschen had a blog post on IBM today that caught my eye – Will IBM Add Analytics to its Toolbelt? in which he quoted Ambuj Goyal (who heads up information management at IBM) as saying predictive analytics are overrated. Sadly this reminded me of the old days of IBM – when FUD (fear, uncertainty [...]
At the Business Intelligence Warehousing and Analytics Summit at Oracle today. BIWA is part of the Oracle User Group focused on BI, analytics and data warehousing. Jeanne Harris of Accenture (author, with Tom Davenport, of Competing on Analytics) started off the day. The subtitle of her presentation is “Building Competitive Strategies Around Data-driven Insights”. Analytics [...]
Tom wrote an interesting post this week on 10 Principles of the New Business Intelligence and made a couple of really good points: 1. Decisions are the unit of work to which BI initiatives should be applied. 2. Providing access to data and tools isn’t enough if you want to ensure that decisions are actually [...]
There is a great conference coming up October 26-30 – not only are Neil and I Co-Chairs but readers of the blog can get a discount. We are presenting twice – A Pre-Conference Tutorial Succeeding as a Decision-Centric Organization and a Keynote Competing on Decisions. Because of this you can get a special $100 Conference [...]
Remember the 1st Enterprise Decision Management Summit and the 11th International Business Rules Forum ? October 26-30, 2008 at the Buena Vista Palace, Orlando FL. Don’t forget that as a reader of this blog we are able to offer you a special, one-time offer as an honorary member of the Friends and Family of the [...]
1st Enterprise Decision Management Summit and the 11th International Business Rules Forum October 26-30, 2008 at the Buena Vista Palace, Orlando FL. I am pleased to announce that we have published the agenda for the Enterprise Decision Management Summit and Business Rules Forum. This is the first time we have run the EDM Summit and [...]
Tony Rose over on Decision Support Analytics had this post where he asked for submissions in a particular format – the one used in the title. I will post a couple of others this week as I have time. Here goes then with the first one: The most important thing I know about Analytics is [...]
Two of Gartner’s smartest analysts – Kurt Schlegel and Gareth Herschel (shameless plug) – just published an excellent little paper called “Business Intelligence and Decision Making“. This paper was one of Gartner’s Strategic Planning Assumptions and the (free) summary says: A subset of organizations that seek a competitive advantage will evolve the primary role of [...]
I was just pointed to an interesting report that Tom Davenport (author of Competing on Analytics) wrote on Strategic Use of Analytics in Government. The report is available on the businessofgovernment.org website. Tom and his co-author do a nice job of summarizing the various ways analytics can and should be used in government. While there [...]
Well there’s now another place to find our materials – I have opened for business as an expert on the B-Eye Network. Check out my channel Competing on Decisions (thanks to Neil for suggesting the name). This blog will be syndicated there but I will also be writing articles, posting white papers and generally making [...]
I was checking out Doug Henschen’s interview of Kurt Schlegel – Gartner BI analyst – and page 2 was particularly excellent. Kurt clearly understands the value of being decision-centric and the need for BI to broaden to include rules and predictive analytics. And he plugged the book too, which is always appreciated. It’s a pity [...]
I am often asked the question in the title – what is a smart (enough) system? Here’s the list we use when we talk about it: Operational While one can make systems of all kinds “smarter” we are talking about making operational, transactional, high-volume, typically customer facing applications smart enough to be useful. Real-Time As [...]
How are you integrating business rules and analytics? How are you adding intelligence to your business processes? How are you putting analytics to work in your operational systems? How, in other words, are you using Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) to innovate your business? Your colleagues and peers want to know. We invite you to present [...]