decision automation

Chris Skinner wrote a nice little piece on the Future Call Center over on the swift community. He had some nice examples, though he was focused on how the future call center might be using video. What struck me, though, was that decision making is critical to his example. Neither the avatar nor the video-linked [...]

Steve Cranford of PwC wrote an interesting piece called Bringing Order to Chaos (brought to my attention by Alan over at Tibco) that made me think. Steve’s focus is on the next software suite for enterprises (something he calls an Intelligent Business Performance Platform) consisting of business intelligence, business process and business rules. Reading this [...]

Ronan Bradley had an interesting article on ebizQ this week – Fertile Ground for ROI in BPM: Three Unlikely Areas. In it he outlined some areas of banking where business process management (BPM) could deliver an ROI. Keeping up with regulations In which he points out that “a feature of BPM systems (over custom coded [...]

Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe had a column “Self-serve and slave” (that I saw in the San Jose Mercury News as “In a self-serve nation, work gets dumped on us“) in which she rails against self-service and compares it to the outsourcing of work from paid employees to us consumers. As she says: For [...]

Thanks to my friends at Bankwatch I heard today about eBank in Japan. The bank is described in this nice article on swiftcommunity.net. What struck me about this was the focus on complete automation of decision making – not just the processes and information colleciton, but the decision making itself. Is this the person they [...]

Optimism in one characteristic that it might see harsh to criticize. But take a look at this article on Accounting for the future. It makes a couple of interesting points. Firstly that the preparation of projections can be misleading and that an “inside view” – caused by developing a detailed plan, say – makes you [...]

This week I thought I would write some posts about how enterprise decision management can help address some of the very real challenges in decision making. First up is peer pressure. A friend sent me this article from the Sloan Review – Applying (and Resisting) Peer Influence -and a couple of key concepts are clear [...]

I can’t blog this session live as John Rymer and Mike Gualtieri have asked me to participate. What follows is a combination of thoughts based on the presentation and post-presentation notes. The theme of the presentation is that “The next frontier in business process management (BPM) and business rules is automating decisions within business processes”. [...]

I spent some time with Peter Docherty of ThinkAnalytics recently, talking about their decisioning product. ThinkAnalytics grew out of K.wiz, a small team focused on the automation of the data mining process. The team had experience in data mining, real-time telecoms monitoring and data compression. They delivered an open, component-based platform with the intent to [...]

Mike Kavitz had a great post on his blog today Want SOA Success? Try this Recipe. I really liked the article, not least because it was clearly based on hard-won experience on Mike’s part. Reading it I saw how similar an Enterprise Decision Management or EDM success recipe would be. Research the living daylights out [...]

I had a chance to talk with Rob Walker last week about Chordiant and their decision management platform. Chordiant focuses on large customers – those with lots of decisions in markets such as retail banking, consumer lending, card services, insurance and communications. Their mantra is Customer Experience Management and they aim to deliver an improvement [...]

A little while ago I got to talk to Mike Zeller and his team at Zementis about their decision management platform – ADAPA, what they call a predictive analytics decision engine. ADAPA stands for Adaptive Decision And Predictive Analytics. The folks at Zementis started trying to solve a fairly common problem in organizations adopting data [...]

The nice folks on the Drools blog pointed me to an article today called Implement business logic with the Drools rules engine. This article was written by Ricardo Olivieri of IBM. Richard does a nice job of walking through both the basic case for using a business rules engine (BRE). I feel compelled to make [...]

Stephen Brobst of Teradata was next with A Reference Architecture for Integrating an Active Data Warehouse into the Real-Time Enterprise. He started with a great quote from a Gartner analyst: No such thing as a business surprise – there is always a warning in advance but were you listening – did you collect data about [...]

Some interesting news from SAS today that, to me at least, boosts their support of enterprise decision management or EDM. First they announced a specific product bundle from their work with Teradata – you can get details here. This integrates SAS Enterprise Miner, their predictive analytics/data mining workbench, with Teradata’s database allowing for models developed [...]

Second session at IDC Directions today and I am listening to Maureen Fleming and Sandy Rogers talking about SOA and BPM. IDC takes the position that this is about a need for agile systems and that BPM and SOA are part of how organizations can address this need. Of course, having just come from a [...]

I dropped by the IDC Directions event today and saw two presentations. First up was Kathy Wilhide talking about Governance, Risk and Compliance or GRC as it is known. The GRC market has grown from a need for higher levels of confidence in financial and operational information. As compliance is not built into most existing [...]

Frank Gens of IDC posted this short item on what Line of Business managers want from their CIOs and it had a nice little graph showing the key things that the business wants from IT. Of the 10 items, several seem to me to show the need for Enterprise Decision Management or EDM: Speed up [...]

After a fascinating lunch with Sandy Carter (of which more later), Steve Demuth gave the BRMS track keynote – Make Change Work to Your Advantage. Steve’s focus is on the potential competitive advantage of rules. Automate decisions, he said, are everywhere – with which I would completely agree – especially if you correctly consider micro [...]