decision automation

My friend Bob Glushko and Lindsay Tabas wrote an interesting paper last year that Bob pointed out to me earlier this month – Bridging the “Front Stage” and “Back Stage” in Service System Design. I liked the paper as it raised some interesting issues about customer interactions, in particular whether interaction design or outcomes is [...]

I saw this post on CustomerThink – Automation Overkill – in which Ginny Wiedower correctly points out that automation of customer treatment can result in an impersonal feel and that customers appreciate the “warm fuzzies” that come from personal interactions. While I don’t disagree with her, there are two things worth considering. Firstly, as I [...]

Continuing this week’s theme of Enterprise Decision Management or EDM in customer service, I am going to focus on one of the most important metrics in call centers – first call resolution. I saw a nice description of what this means in Tools To Improve First Call Resolution on CRM Daily: When you call a [...]

One of the biggest sources of confusion with Enterprise Decision Management or EDM is the worry that it requires enterprise-wide adoption to be valuable. That, unless a huge project is undertaken to adopt the technologies and approaches required, no value will be gained. “Enterprise” is, after all, one of the most overused term in the [...]

Mike Kavitz asked this question – Why are you still generating reports? – on his blog today and it made me think. Why ARE you still generating reports? Not just in the way Mike means the question (why is IT generating reports instead of empowering users with information). I mean this in a broader way [...]

Mike replied to my post about his question on enterprise metadata. He, like me, prefers David Marco’s definition of metadata as “all physical data and knowledge from inside and outside an organization, including information about the physical data, technical and business processes, rules and constraints of the data, and structures of the data used by [...]

I attended a very interesting presentation given by Henk from Cordys this week on Case Management. With Henk’s permission I have posted his slides on Slideshare.net (you can see them embedded below). Case management is an interesting “subset” of Business Process Management. I say “subset” as I don’t think that case management “processes” are really [...]

Ron Shevlin blogged about CapOne’s new Card Lab. Like Ron I really like the fact that CapOne is using the interactivity possible on the web both to let customers find a product that meets their requirements and to gather a whole bunch of useful information about how customers think about credit cards. What strikes me, [...]

Bill over at the Wireless MD had a couple of interesting posts on e-prescribing today – Senatorial bi-partisan support for e-prescribing and Caveats for e-prescribing. The use of technology to improve healthcare is an endlessly fascinating discussion and the use of information systems to handle prescriptions (e-prescribing) is one of the most debated. There is [...]

One of my favorite BI bloggers, Cyril Brookes, had an interesting post today – What Does Web 2.0 Really Mean for BI’s Future?. He starts by pointing out that “Successful BI enables the executives and professionals to make better decisions” to which I would add that successful enterprise decision management enables the systems in an [...]

Having posted some initial thoughts on RuleBurst’s acquisition of Haley, I was lucky enough to get some time with Peter Still, VP Strategy. Peter and I spent an interesting hour discussing the merger and the combined companies plans so I thought I would share some of my thoughts. The first interesting thing to note is [...]

An interesting post caught my eye recently – Should we still call it Application Development? This seems like an interesting question, particularly when you start considering the decomposition of the application that has taken place over the last decade. Not so long ago, applications (especially enterprise applications) were monolithic. They handled their own data, user [...]

Jim Sinur, formerly the rules guru over at Gartner and now CSO At Global 360 has a blog to which he has started posting. He already has three posts I found interesting: The Grey Wave is Coming: BPM has to HelpAutomating decisions is also critical when you start thinking about the impending wave of retirement. [...]

Timo Elliott of the BI questions blog had a “prediction” about 2008 this month – 2008: From Business Automation to Business Optimization?. Timo makes some great points and I agree with his premise that past is about automating business processes and the future is going to be about optimizing the business, in part by ensuring [...]

Mark Proctor, he of Drools fame, posted today on his vision for unifying rules and processes. Not content with describing me as “large” and “infamous” in a previous post, now he has to get my blood pressure up with this new post! Seriously, though, I am going to disagree with Mark’s basic premise. For starters, [...]

I got a chance to attend some of Enterprise Search Summit West yesterday (thanks to my friends at Semantra). I attended a couple of sessions and browsed the exhibit hall. The first session was entitled “What is Semantic Search“. Seth Earley gave a rapid 30 minute overview of semantic search. He touched on explicit and [...]

I always enjoy reading David Raab’s work and his recent post on marketing software was no exception. In The Next Big Leap for Marketing Software he makes a number of great points and I particularly like the steps he lays out for getting people on board. I have blogged before about the value of using [...]

I saw this article today on Real-Time Analytics: The Importance of Strategic Alignment and Ease of Use, and it made me think (again) about the danger of pretty pictures. While the article makes some good points about analytics in manufacturing, it seems to me that the author is sucked in to thinking that pretty pictures [...]

[amazonify]0553805401:right[/amazonify][amazonify]0553805401::text::::Super Crunchers: Why thinking by numbers is the new way to be smart[/amazonify] Ian Ayres book, Super Crunchers: Why thinking by numbers is the new way to be smart, is another book extolling the virtues of data-driven decision making. In that regard it is very similar to Competing on Analytics. The book focuses in on [...]