EDM

Continuing my series on the opportunity for IBM now it has completed its acquisition of ILOG, I wanted to discuss multi-platform support in the ILOG BRMS. This is an issue because there is an apparent tension between IBM’s behavior over the last few years and ILOG’s: IBM is seen as a very Java-centric company IBM’s [...]

Elana Anderson, now at Unica, wrote a nice piece titled Where CRM Goes Next for Baseline Magazine. In a short piece she highlights some of the key challenges for CRM/Marketing going foward: It must become more focused on interactive marketing, engaging with customers It must break free from old habits like fixed campaign schedules and [...]

BusinessWeek had an interesting article in December about the growth of Tesco, a British grocery chain, and on its use of data mining as a competitive weapon. Here’s a quote: Analysts say that Tesco’s big advantage over major international rivals, which also include Germany’s Aldi and Lidl, is its unrivaled ability to manage vast reams [...]

Tom Davenport has done some research into analytics and retail (reported here: Retailers recognise analytics as key to business transformation. Here’s a quote from the new item: Retailers today are searching for ways to derive more customer intelligence, marketing savvy and operational insight from their overflowing databases. In addition to acknowledging that the use of [...]

Dan Rosanova wrote a piece on The SOA Knowledge Gap that made me think (again) about the value of business rules as a way to manage requirements. Dan points out that
“A unique SOA challenge is its need to bring together SMEs from across the enterprise.”
Now this is true but I don’t believe that better management of requirements is the answer. In fact what is needed is a way to turn what the SMEs know into something that can be managed in a repository and used to power systems directly. Working with SMEs to create sets of business rules to represent their know-how not only allows this knowledge to be stored in an executable format – reducing the likelihood of implementation error and speeding deployment and maintenance – it also allows each SME or SME group to manage their own rules. A modern Business Rules Management System (BRMS) will allow different users to have different access to rule sets, allowing each set of rules to be managed by those who know them best or those who “own” them. The BRMS can then be used to package up the relevant rules – typically many sets from many SMEs – into a decision service that can be deployed into a service-oriented architecture.
Because the SME’s can edit the rules directly, business agility is increased because the time from the SME realizing that a change is needed to the time when that change is deployed can be cut dramatically using the rule management features of a typical BRMS.
Dan’s comments about how to gather the know-how from SMEs are all good, but gathering their know how as requirements and not rules is going to limit the good it can do. I have blogged a lot on this topic but check out these two posts on the difference between requirements and Requirements and on how to fit business rules into a software development lifecycle.

I got a briefing on IVIS Group’s Sonetto product this week. Sonetto is most famous as the platform for Tesco’s multi-channel strategy. Sonetto is a product designed to focus on multi-channel operations, especially (but not exclusively) multi-channel retail. They make the very valid point that multi-channel retail is complex. Not only do retailers have multiple [...]

The EDM Summit is going to Las Vegas, Nov 1-5, 2009 Mark Your Calendars! The 2009 event will be bigger and better than ever. In addition to the usual focus on business rules and intelligent decisioning (chaired by yours-truly), there are going to be a Business Alignment Symposium and “How-To” Project Labs to deliver practical [...]

Joe McKendrick wrote a nice article on how EDM give companies a competitive edge for the Teradata Magazine this month. Joe did a nice job, as usual, of bringing out some key points and quoting me. My two favorite quotes were: In addition, it’s inherently difficult to build actionable intelligence into most existing applications. “Enterprise [...]

At the Business Intelligence Warehousing and Analytics Summit at Oracle today. BIWA is part of the Oracle User Group focused on BI, analytics and data warehousing. Jeanne Harris of Accenture (author, with Tom Davenport, of Competing on Analytics) started off the day. The subtitle of her presentation is “Building Competitive Strategies Around Data-driven Insights”. Analytics [...]

Tom wrote an interesting post this week on 10 Principles of the New Business Intelligence and made a couple of really good points: 1. Decisions are the unit of work to which BI initiatives should be applied. 2. Providing access to data and tools isn’t enough if you want to ensure that decisions are actually [...]

Well as you might have noticed I have a new blog location – jtonedm.com (JT on EDM). The blog on smartenoughsystems.com/wp is now retired and all the posts will redirect here. If you have a link to the smartenoughsystems blog please move it – just replace smartenoughsystems.com/wp with jtonedm.com (note the dropping of the /wp).

I was pointed to a post today on the topic of customer service (Another Day, Another Customer-Service Nightmare on the EconoWhiner) that pointed out that companies need to provide quality service and quality customer service if they’re going to survive an economic downturn as severe as this one? Now I am not going to pick [...]

CRM Daily had a nice little article on Customer Retention that reminded me of the example I often use for how the elements of decision management contribute to more effective customer retention decisions. Large organizations spend vast sums on retention – one bank, for instance, spends $1Bn annually – and retention is a perfect candidate [...]

An old friend sent me a link to an article on the Financial Times – How to survive an IT squeeze. I was struck by a couple of quotes: Scarcity of capital will generate increased competition for the cash that is available. Consequently it will be even more important that businesses do everything they can [...]

I just wrote an article for BPM Institute on The Technology of Business (Enterprise) Decision Management. It’s short but, if you want more, Neil and I are working on a multi-vendor study of the technology for decision management that we should have available really soon…

I thought I would wrap up with some closing thoughts for the week: Lots of discussion of the importance of data – understanding it, integrating it, cleaning it and making the same data available to those reporting on it, doing analytics with it and running operational systems. Interesting times in the rules market with recent [...]

Not really live this post as I am working from notes I took – after all I was on the panel and it’s hard to participate and blog at the same time. Joining me on the panel were Don Baisley of Microsoft, Ron Ross and Jim Sinur (of Gartner) – Neil had to leave. We [...]

Michele Edelman of Discover presented on Building Blocks of Decision Management: “Tools to Rule”. Michele spends a lot of time educating people inside Discover and her team use sources like McKinsey to show executives why EDM matters. For instance, a report on top 10 macro-economic trends: Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly not just [...]

Day 3 starts early – 8am for the first session. The Expo closed yesterday and today will be just content. Yesterday was an interesting day with lots of discussion among the attendees of the Oracle acquisition of Haley. Here are the blog posts I found for yesterday 2008 Business Rules Forum – Day 1 2008 [...]