decisioning

Some weeks back I wrote a series of posts on the role of Decision Management in Insurance. One post was called multi-channel distribution and customer communication and outlined how Decision Services that automate customer decisions improve customer treatment in a multi-channel world by improving their accuracy, timeliness and consistency. The diagram at left shows how [...]

As companies move to this more changeable, uncertain world that requires a coordinate extended enterprise, it is essential to manage decisions as well as processes – not by using process management to manage decisions but by managing decisions alongside processes. These operational decisions – micro decisions – are the front line in driving business agility [...]

Interesting panel with folks from the Venetian, Marriott and Nextag discussing customer intelligence. First they were asked about their use of analytics: Nextag is an online comparison shopping engine that assembles data from 10,000 merchants online for consumers. They make money by buying clicks on search engines and then getting payments from merchants for referrals. [...]

I have been reading some of Ron Ross’ recent pieces on operational decisions. First there is a nice article called “Operational Business Decisions: Whose Decisions Are They Anyway” on BR Community. A short read this makes some great points that are worth re-iterating: We need to focus on a decision “the way business people see [...]

I got a chance to catch up with Kount recently, a 4 year old company that is a wholly owned subsidiary of Keynetics (a 13 year old e-commerce company) focused on preventing fraud in e-commerce. They offer an all-in-one SaaS solution aimed at detecting fraud fast (intra-transaction real-time) while giving customers flexibility and usability. They [...]

Gurobi is the latest entrant to the mainstream optimization engine market (IBM/ILOG CPLEX and FICO Dash being the two main players with CPLEX having by far the largest market share). Gurobi was founded by Zonghau Gu, Ed Rothberg and Bob Bixby in 2008. The three of them were instrumental in the development of  CPLEX, the [...]

Talking about claims and using Decision Management to improve claims I recently caught up with Donald Light of Celent. Donald recently wrote a new report for Celent – Claims Systems Vendors, North American P/C Insurance 2011. This is the most recent update of the Celent study that evaluates vendors in the claims processing space. The [...]

When companies use Decision Management to put data and analytics to work in underwriting, the results are dramatic. For example, one insurance company with about 750,000 policies implemented Decision Management and risk-based underwriting for use across its channels. The company achieved an 8-point reduction in combined ratio in its first year. This was the result [...]

I got a chance to catch up with Attensity after a long absence recently (I last blogged about Attensity in 2008). Attensity has been doing text analytics and customer experience monitoring for 10 years or more. Their approach includesfour steps –  Listen, Analyze, Relate, Act (from a decision management perspective it is nice to see [...]

Syndicated from International Institute for Analytics Tom Davenport pointed me to an interesting article recently – Judgment Call or Automated Decision—Or Both? – by Jan Abrams. It’s an interesting article and I go back and forth as I read it in terms of agreeing or disagreeing with Jan. First, let me say that the use [...]

I was presenting this week to a company that asked what trends I saw in business rules. I had my ow thoughts but I also reached out to some other experience business rules implementers. Here’s what we came up with: A broader context for business rules Business rules are increasingly adopted as part of a [...]

The folks at IDC (Dan Vesset, Maureen Fleming, Steve Hendrick, Henry Morris and others) have just released Worldwide Decision Management Software 2010–2014 Forecast: A Fast-Growing Opportunity to Drive the Intelligent Economy – the first ever market sizing for “Decision Management”. This is exciting – it’s great to have a leading research organization like IDC pull [...]

My friend Carsten Ziegler, with Thomas Albrecht, has just released a new book on business rules for SAP customers – BRFplus — Business Rule Management for ABAP Applications. I was delighted to provide a foreword to this book as I think BRFplus is a terrific tool for SAP customers, giving them the power of business [...]

I got a quick update from the customer intelligence folks at SAS recently. Customer Intelligence is SAS’ largest solution line (with dedicated sales, marketing and engineering) and they are projecting to have a record year in 2010. SAS describes their SAS  Customer Intelligence Suite as providing three core benefits for organizations, each based on a [...]

I am giving a workshop – The Decisions at the heart of your process – at the Gartner BPM Summit in Baltimore, April 27-29 2011. This workshop introduces the decision management approach and critical decisioning technologies such as predictive analytics and business rules. The workshop is going to be highly interactive. As well as instructions [...]

I met General Intelletics at the recent Building Business Capability conference. The founder has been working in artificial intelligence and configurators for about 10 years. One of his clients wanted to put together an insurance program for a gold mine in Turkey – total premiums of about $4M/year. He found that there are no real [...]

I saw this interesting McKinsey piece recently – Rediscovering the art of selling – McKinsey Quarterly – Retail & Consumer Goods – Strategy & Analysis – and I was struck by the value of analytics in this context. What retailers really need to do, according to McKinsey, is focus on hiring sales people with personality, [...]

Interesting announcements last week from three companies I have reviewed recently – Predixion, Zementis and Lyzasoft. Predixion has developed some interesting cloud-based predictive analytic technology – tools to load data from Excel and build predictive models from it – while Lyzasoft has a nice collaborative business intelligence environment and Zementis has a cloud-based deployment engine [...]

in2clouds is focused on helping companies use Predictive Analytics to improve their business performance. Founded by MicroStrategy alumni and launched in 2009, in2clouds is a small company that has been working in hi-tech, financial services and retail. Seeing analytics as “the next big thing” they want to reduce the friction for mainstream adoption and help [...]