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Syndicated from ebizQ Jim Sinur had a short post on The Power of Visibility with BPM Enabled Processes that made me think about another kind of visibility – visibility of decisions. One of the most powerful benefits of adopting business rules to manage decisions is that the approach generates increased visibility into the decision making [...]

Jim Sinur asked (and answered) a similar question on this blog recently – Do I Really Need a Business Rule Capability? Now I generally talk about Decision Services as the driver for business rules – services that answer business questions for other services – so how can you tell that a service is ideal for [...]

Syndicated from BeyeNetwork This headline came from a briefing I got from LucidEra about their spring release and was so good I just had to use it. Think about it – if all a dashboard does is stress you out and raise your blood pressure by telling you what’s wrong without giving you any help [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Jim Sinur, over on the Gartner blog, has a post this week on Rule Guided Processes are the Way of the Future in which he says There are obvious benefits in making business policies/rules explicit and easily changed via accompanying quick-change processes. Now I have blogged before about the power of business [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Well last week was exciting on the ebizQ blog – thousands of new visitors after a link from a popular programming blog. This article – Programming Sucks! Or At Least, It Ought To – referred to an old article of mine – Don’t soft-code, use business rules that had been prompted by [...]

Jim Sinur posted BPM Needs to Add More Intelligence to Decisions Surrounding Processes and said: Going forward, I see a need for more sophisticated decisions that will require a deeper integration of rules, analytics, and complex events. If you read my blogs, you know I agree with this statement in broad terms. I think, however, [...]

A press release caught my eye recently on CRM – Gartner Identifies the Top Six CRM Marketing Processes for a Cost-Constrained Economy. Two of the six processes Gartner identified seem to me to require decision management to be done well. 1.Retention Management Retaining high value or potential high-value customers is essential in difficult economic times. [...]

With the business world in a state of flux and everyone worried about what might happen next, and how they might respond to it, scenario testing (and its compatriot, stress testing) should be top of mind for executives. They should be thinking about different scenarios, testing out how those scenarios would effect their business and trying out various alternatives. On the risk side they should be using this kind of scenario planning to stress their assumptions – stress testing – to see how their financial reserves would cope with the various alternatives.

For too many executives, however, this kind of testing is done only at the aggregate level and done largely (if not completely) in Excel. I have nothing against Excel but this is clearly not really acceptable. Good scenario or stress testing should consider how customers, products, suppliers, locations will be impacted by the scenario at a granular level and then present rolled-up results, not simply attempt to model some averages or totals. Similarly, if executives want to develop alternative scenarios that would be effective in certain possible futures then they need to test those scenarios against actual transactions, actual customers, to see if they work.

Companies that have adopted decision management have the infrastructure to manage this. Decision management brings the crucial decisions – choices of actions – into the open and makes them explicit. Scenarios can be developed for these decisions and tested against real data. The results can be compared against what happened, or against alternative scenarios to see what would work best. Different assumptions can easily be fed into the decisions to see what impact those assumptions have and stress testing or scenario development conducted based on the results. Decision management makes all this possible. It’s still work, but it is much less work and the results can be much more precise and grounded in real decisions.

A growth in scenario management was one of my predictions for 2009 and Jim Sinur wrote a nice piece on this too – Scenario Planning is No Longer Optional.

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 [...]

Well at least one more as of today – Jim Sinur, over on his Gartner blog – has finally started to use the phrase he has been threatening to use for a while “Intelligent Decision Management”. While Jim has not published a formal definition – I expect he will soon now he is back at [...]

There are only 12 Days Left to register for the first Enterprise Decision Management Summit so get off your butt and register! Neil and I Co-Chairs and readers of the blog can get a discount. We are presenting twice – A Pre-Conference Tutorial Succeeding as a Decision-Centric Organization and a Keynote Competing on Decisions. Because [...]

My friend Kurt Schlegel at Gartner has just released a new report – Deliver Business Value With a BICC (BI Competency Center) Focused on Decision Making. In it he “identifies the steps required to evolve business intelligence (BI) beyond reporting measures, to making great decisions”. Like Kurt I believe that “Tying BI to the decision [...]

Janelle Hill of Gartner kicked off day 2. Business Process Management is the current approach to being process-centric and part of a long history stretching back to Taylor/Deming, Business Process Reengineering and more. In particular it is an evolution from computerized process flow, to packaged applications as best practices and now flexible and adaptive processes. [...]

Two of Gartner’s smartest analysts – Kurt Schlegel and Gareth Herschel (shameless plug) – just published an excellent little paper called “Business Intelligence and Decision Making“. This paper was one of Gartner’s Strategic Planning Assumptions and the (free) summary says: A subset of organizations that seek a competitive advantage will evolve the primary role of [...]

Howard Dresner, now independent but previously of Gartner and Hyperion and one of the leading voices in the Business Intelligence and Performance Management space listed Some good sources and included our book and our blogs (this one and Neil’s on Intelligent Enterprise). Thanks Howard.

Last session for me today, indeed the last session before I go home, is Janelle Hill of Gartner and Kramer Reeves of IBM on improving agility through end-to-end process agility. Janelle went first sharing Gartner’s BPM Scenario for the next five years. She had two initial points: In 2013, do you know where your work [...]

I was checking out Doug Henschen’s interview of Kurt Schlegel – Gartner BI analyst – and page 2 was particularly excellent. Kurt clearly understands the value of being decision-centric and the need for BI to broaden to include rules and predictive analytics. And he plugged the book too, which is always appreciated. It’s a pity [...]

Neil and I are attending the DAMA conference this week and I will be blogging from some sessions. First one (after a fairly long set of announcements) is the Tuesday morning keynote, Michael Blechar of Gartner on The Yin & Yang of Process and Data: Which Will Be King of the Next Generation of Applications? [...]

This week seems to be my week for customer service lists. Earlier I posted Using decision management to hang on to your customers – a response to a list in a post on CRM Daily. Today I saw a nice post on Jim Berkowitz’s site – Gartner Outlines 7 Initiatives to Improve Customer Experience that [...]