decision automation

I was talking to a customer the other day about a particular decisioning problem they have. There’s an operational decision that they take several thousand times a year. Not a transactional one but a pretty high volume one. Sometimes these decisions have a large financial impact but often they have a smaller one. Today the [...]

Like many of you, I am sure, I am fan of xkcd. After all, any site that is both humorous and has a wiki to explain WHY it’s humorous (explainxkcd.com) must be good. A recent one struck a chord: We do a lot of work with companies that have been investing heavily in digitizing their [...]

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 [...]

Maureen Fleming of IDC presented at IDC Directions on How Does Decision-Centric Computing Drive Digital Transformation? She kindly shared this presentation with me. Decision-centric computing, she says: continuously receives and analyzes data to predict when decisions need to be made, systematically learns how to automate those decisions, and acts on each decision to improve performance. [...]

DecisionCAMP 2018 in in Europe – Luxembourg to be precise – September 17-19. This is a great event and well worth your time if you are interested in the nuts and bolts of decisioning technology, Decision Management or decision modeling. Last year’s event in London was great with a wide range of presentations and lots [...]

SAS Decision Manager is SAS’ platform for decision automation and is getting a significant update in December 2017. I wrote a product review of SAS Decision Manager in 2014 and a number of things have changed in the new release, which is on the new SAS Platform and leverages new SAS Viya technologies. SAS Decision [...]

I am giving a webinar on Boost Straight Through Processing in Your Claims System with Decision Automation at 10am Pacific on November 16. Register for this free webinar to see how you can automate decisions to handle more claims without manual intervention. Boost your Jet or Straight Through Processing rates to new heights to reduce costs, [...]

I spoke at the IBM Process Transformation Summit today on Transforming Business Operations One Decision At A Time. I began with some examples of operational excellence, showing how four pillars really matter – data, metrics, processes and decisions. Of these, it is decisions and processes that offer opportunity to transform business operations. Organizations that transform themselves in [...]

Lisa Kart and Roy Schulte recently published a new research report Develop Good Decision Models to Succeed at Decision Management (subscription required). This is the first piece of formal research published by Gartner on decision modeling. Their introduction text says The industry trends toward algorithmic business and decision automation are driving wider adoption of the decision management [...]

I presented on the lessons we have learned deploying decision management and decision modeling at scale at various clients, specifically some large financial institutions. We have some case study like papers available (contact us for a copy) and here are the key takeaways: Decision Modeling Widely Accessible, Collaborative Lots of people can build and use [...]

I am giving a webinar on Sell Business Rules to your Boss with Progress on July 14th at Noon ET: You know and understand the key issues you face on a day to day basis. But does your boss? Often times you are faced with developing a new business application requiring complex logic or lots of [...]

I blogged a little about the tech preview of IBM’s Operational Decision Manager – Advanced product when I was at IMPACT and I recently got a full briefing on the new ODM Advanced release. ODM Advanced has been under development for about 2 years with early access for customers back in late 2013 and technology [...]

I last looked at Scorto back in 2010 (see this First Look). The firm continues to be focused on Decision Management and risk management solutions and now has 7 offices around the world focused on insurance and banking customers. In particular Scorto focuses on debt collection, customer acquisition, loan origination and risk management. The products [...]

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 [...]

1. You want my business users to do WHAT? Yes, pure fear is the number one reason. There are still a lot of IT departments who cannot accept the idea of the business community maintaining business rules. Mostly this is aversion to the perceived risk but sometimes it is simple fear that they personally will [...]

2. Business users wouldn’t know what to do with decision automation if they had it “My business users don’t want to get involved” “But I can’t get users to tell me the rules now” “I don’t want the users telling us how to do our jobs” The first reaction to decision automation technology from some [...]

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. [...]

5. I can’t afford it Just like any new approach, decision automation software costs money, so does the training, so does the initial help you need. A sense that it cannot be afforded comes from either the team with the initial problem or from the IT department as a whole. When the problem comes from [...]

6. My new operational system will do that One of the “hardy perennials” when it comes to technology is that some new system already in the works will address the problem. In the case of decision automation this can take the form of “my new package includes that process/decision” or “my new package already has [...]