Janelle Hill talked about the BPM Scenario and the role of BPM in creating intelligent operations. She had three things to cover – why is BPM more important than ever, business optimization and where to go next. First, she reminded us of some key elements of BPM from Gartner’s perspective: BPM involves a focus on [...]
governance
Michael Rasmussen had a great post recently – Hordes of Policies Scattered Across the Organization – in which he had a great list of the challenges with risk management policies. Now Michael’s view of Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC) is a little different than mine but he is spot on with this list of issues. [...]
Nationwide Implements a Business Rules Solution to Improve Financial Processes Across the Enterprise
Three folks from Nationwide Insurance introduced their ILOG business rules implementation. Nationwide is one of the largest insurance and financial services companies with multiple brands offering products in property and casualty, mortgages, lines of credit, retirement plans and more. They are 124 on the Fortune 500, 16M policies and 32,000 staff. This project focused on [...]
Steve Mills kicked off day 2 to talk about the kind of IT architecture that supports business agility. Your IT architecture, he says, must enable business processes run reliably and securely across application silos. Business must own their processes and their data, not have them be subsumed into siloed packaged applications. IT must enable these [...]
The new Business Process Manager 7.5 brings together the WebSphere Lombardi Edition and WebSphere Process Server in a single go-forward product. IBM wanted to bring the power of the WPS runtime and the simplicity of the Lombardi platform while significantly improving design time governance and end to end visibility. The new product has: Process Server [...]
Focus of the presentation from Russ Cobb was Banking, Insurance, Retail and Government. Banking first. Lots of releases this year primarily around Enterprise Risk Management, Governance Risk Compliance, Customer intelligence, fraud and financial crime solutions. Key customer issues for SAS in banking: Customer Growth How do you identify, grow and manage your most profitable customers. [...]
A client of mine – Fiserv in Norcross GA – is looking a Decision Management Architect. This individual will be required to: Partner with Fiserv Business Units and 3rd parties/partners to lead and facilitate the definition of a robust & scalable technical architecture foundation for the solution that would meet business requirements and vision of [...]
Strategy Meets Actions’ research reports that insurers have tens, hundreds, even thousands of initiatives. To achieve these goals, aligning the business and IT is critical, as is setting the right priorities, and ensuring technology investments support these priorities. Decision Management focuses on the key business decisions, and moves away from a focus on functional processes [...]
Insurers face new and growing challenges as the market moves into recovery in 2011: more delivery channels, demographic shifts, a changing competitive landscape and a rapidly evolving regulatory and compliance environment. Many insurers are faced with meeting this challenges hampered by inflexible legacy applications, underutilized data from internal systems and external sources, and manual spreadsheets [...]
I followed up with Steve Culp of Accenture about their announcement of a new Risk Management practice earlier this year. Obviously Accenture has been doing risk management for a long time but they have now brought together people who were already working in this space in different verticals and in their information systems practice as [...]
IBM today released a new report on the progress companies are making adopting business analytics and optimization. The paper is called “Smarter decisions for optimized performance” (love it) and focuses on how companies are using analytics and optimization to “breakaway” – a sports analogy such as where a cyclist breaks away from the pack not [...]
While at the recent Gartner BPM conference (twitter feed at #gartnerbpm) I got some interesting questions from @gagan_s. He saw my posts on the bare essentials of making rules work and @skemsley‘s post on my advanced decisioning for process excellence session (recording here). The first question he asked was a follow-up to Jim Sinur (@jimsinur) [...]
I am speaking at the Brainstorm conference in San Francisco and blogging a couple of sesssions. First up today is Michael Melenovsky (formerly of Gartner) on Accelerating BPM Adoption – creating a vision and establishing a roadmap. Michael made the great point that companies sometimes get started with BPM to try it out and then [...]
As previewed yesterday, ILOG (now an IBM company) is releasing the 7.0 products of their business rule management system (BRMS) family. These mark a big step forward for the ILOG product range. ILOG BRMS 7.0 has the standard BRMS components – an Eclipse-based development environment (Rule Studio), a web-based collaboration environment for non-technical users (Rule [...]
The International Business Rules Forum™ is the premier Conference dedicated to Business Rules, where the future of Business Rules, Decisioning, Compliance & Enterprise Design is taking shape! This year’s event covers Business Rules, Decision Management, Business Process, Governance and Compliance. Once again I will be giving a tutorial and a keynote and acting as track [...]
Connie Moore of Forrester presented on empowering business users to embrace change and began with a great quote from a customer – “Change NEVER settles down”! You need to embrace change and accept it as a norm – to accept that business processes and dynamic business processes. In this environment, business people play an essential [...]
Vision Service Plan, VSP, presented on their use of business rules to build agile business processes in healthcare. VSP has some 55M customers in their plans and have been an IBM/ILOG customer since 2002. Every process in healthcare is governed by policies, regulations – every process has decisions that must be made following the rules [...]
Jim Johnson of IBM gave IBM’s point of view on quality lifecycle management. Jim works in Global Services and works with auto and truck manufacturers. IBM’s research shows: That warranty reserves accrue at between 1% and 3% of sales and this is continuing to increase. Detection to correction cycles average over 100 days and can [...]
I am at the Warranty Chain Management conference this week and blogging more or less live. Despite the economy there are over 180 attendees as well as a solid core of sponsors. Marc McKenzie, Global Director of Corporate Warranty & Governance from Hewlett Packard gave the opening presentation on the strategic importance of warranty. HP [...]
Another panel, this time on how business rules fits into an agile IT infrastructure. British Airways, PMI (mortgage related services), Swiss Medical (Argentinian health insurance) and Wyndham Group were represented. Panels are tough to blog so here’s a list of takeaways: Start small and in a well known area to prove out the technology but [...]

