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First Look – Frontline Solver

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 [...]

Little bit of  a late start for me so I am starting with Geoffrey De Smet from Red Hat talking about constraint planning. He points out that some decisions cannot be easily solved with rules-based approaches – they can be described as decision (and as a DMN decision model in our experience) but not readily [...]

This year DecisionCAMP will be hosted by the International Web Rule Symposium (RuleML) on July 7, 2016 at Stony Brook University, New York, USA. This year’s event will aim to summarize the current state in Decision Management with a particular focus on the use of the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard. As always it will show [...]

As you may have noticed I am working on a new book – Available now! Real-World Decision Modeling with DMN – with Jan Purchase. Yesterday Jan had a great blog post – Why Decision Modeling? (In 1000 Words). Jan makes some great points, emphasizing the value of  decision modeling with DMN in: Transparency of the logic Separation  of [...]

A long time ago I came across a company called Erudine and blogged about the Erudine Behaviour Engine. At that time, Erudine came out of the defence, aerospace and nuclear power industries where the slightest mistake can lead to disaster. Today, Erudine’s more recent focus has been in the banking, financial services and investment sectors. [...]

Brian McDonough has been writing (with Dan Vesset, Steve Hendrick, Henry Morris and others) on Decision Management at IDC for many years and he has recently published an IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Decision Management Software Platform 2014 Vendor Assessment. The report has an IDC MarketScape figure, IDC’s opinion on the Decision Management market, process and software as well as some [...]

As part of my ongoing series on Marketing Decision Management solutions I recently caught up with Granata Decision Systems. Granata was founded in 2012 by folks from the University of Toronto who specialize in optimization and AI. GDS’ product is a marketing optimization solution targeted at organizations with a relatively sophisticated customer analytics environment who [...]

Jim Sinur, Gartner Emeritus, is next at Building Business Capability talking about the possibilities of transformation resulting from BPM and process models. Businesses, he says, are in a battle to lead in revenue per hour worked. This means a constant focus on increasing productivity and the linkage of every action to desired business outcomes. It [...]

We recently released The Decision Management Manifesto. In previous posts I explained why we did this and why decisions are important. This week I want to talk about the technologies involved in Decision Management. Most organizations will find that adopting Decision Management requires them to adopt some new technologies. Managing and automating business decisions is different [...]

Continuing to expand on the questions I asked Andrea Scarso co-founder and COO of MoneyFarm when I interviewed him I wanted to focus on the question “How, specifically, do you develop requirements for analytic projects?” “In my opinion, it is paramount to start from the single and specific decision needed. Then, with a top-down process, to analyze its component elements: hard data, [...]

I last got briefed by Sparkling Logic back in August 2012 and I got an update on their new Kyoto release. The new release has a big focus on the user interface and on making the information in the system more accessible. First off SMARTS now immediately shows information about new features including links to [...]

I got an update on Marketswitch Optimization as part of my series on marketing decision management solutions. Experian positions Marketswitch Optimization for the most advanced stage of decisioning– as clients move from profiling and segmenting their customers, to predictive scoring and business rules to optimization. They see some interesting numbers for improvement through this lifecycle [...]

First Look: OpenL Tablets

I got an update from Exigen Services recently on their OpenL Tablets business rules product. Exigen Services is a global IT company focused on core systems transformations and management consulting. They have 10 delivery centers around the world and about 1,500 professionals.  They work in most industries with a focus on insurance, financial services, pharma, [...]

Decision optimizer is one of FICO’s Decision Management Tools and is designed to address some specific challenges in customer decisioning, particularly that there are often competing objectives and very large numbers of customers (and thus customer decisions) involved. Combine this with the many possible action combinations, uncertainty about what customers might do, as well as [...]

As part of the ongoing blog series on Marketing Decision Management Solutions I got an update from SAP on Real-Time Offer Management. This is based on an acquisition made at the end of 2006 of a real time recommendation technology developed for the CRM market, with early adoption mainly by the competitive service industries – [...]

IBM has a portfolio of decision optimization products that are integral to their smarter analytics strategy, aimed at both the hard-core optimization experts as well as targeting line of business markets. IBM sees optimization expanding, expanding from the traditional optimization technology market to a more mainstream decision optimization platform with an increasing focus on specific [...]

First Look – Lityx IQ

Lityx was started about 7 years ago with a focus on analytics, especially marketing analytics. Lityx is focused particularly on more complex forms of analytics such as predictive modeling and optimization. Lityx works with companies from non-profit, media, gaming, financial services, healthcare and retail. Their initial focus has been on marketing analytics and involves optimizing [...]

First Look – Be Informed 4

Be Informed recently gave me an update on their progress. Based in the Netherlands, they were founded back in 2002 and they released 4.0 last year and have been focused on building a large number of projects across Europe, especially in the Netherlands. Focus areas are public sector and financial services. They are over 200 [...]

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 [...]