IT

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 [...]

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 [...]

Syndicated from Smart Data Collective I was inspired to write something this week on the need to get people to collaborate by a post Jim Harris wrote called The Business versus IT—Tear down this wall! and the response Gary Cokins made in That Wall Dividing IT and Users. Both Jim and Gary make the point [...]

I just completed my presentation at RulesFest so here are the key points. For the RulesFest audience I assumed that either they were already using business rules or at least that they plan to be, and that  they knew what a rule engine is and how it works. Before going on to my five points, [...]

I got a briefing from BEZ recently, after Claudia Imhoff (@claudia_imhoff) referred them to me. BEZ has historically worked on the IT side of organizations, using predictive analytics to take historical data about system performance and transactions and use it to predict application response times, throughput, utilization of resources etc. BEZ compares itself to a [...]

This is a piece I wrote for Chris Pratt’s quarterly financial institutions newsletter The use of technology to automate and manage decisions, especially high volume decisions essential to day-to-day operational execution, is expanding rapidly. Beginning with the consumer credit business, use of decision engines and decision management has spread to all aspects of financial services [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Johan den Haan had a great post on Business Agility through Model Driven Development in which he had 3 things important to driving business agility: Provide short feedback cycles. …From the start you need iterations, a lot of them. …finally learn from the production system by monitoring it and feeding that information [...]

When I blogged about Jim Sinur’s session “Business rules are king” at the Gartner BPM Summit I provoked a very thoughtful response from Tom Graves – On business rules. While Tom strongly agreed with the basic implication that organizations need discipline around business rules he identified three concerns, all of which seem to me to [...]

Lisa posted an interesting comment on an old post of mine (Why don’t you replace COBOL with something useful (not Java)) in which she make some interesting comments: I understand your last point that using a declarative “model” such business rules would be preferable to replace legacy COBOL applications instead of using a procedural language. [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform. Finally the platform must allow effective collaboration between all the various groups involved in decision making. The IT department that runs the operational systems, the business people who make decisions and set policy, the executives who drive strategy and even the [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ This week I am discussing the characteristics of a decision-centric platform. Because compliance is essential in decision making, the traceability of decisions and decision making logic to the organization’s objectives, regulations and policies is essential. Business users changing decision making must understand how that change will impact the organization, how it supports [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ The first critical characteristic of a decision-centric organization, obviously enough, is a focus on decisions instead of processes or functions. The decisions an organization makes, the actions it selects from the possible alternatives are critical. Decisions are what make strategy real and drive results and performance against metrics. Implementing a strategy defined [...]

Another webinar in the ongoing series this fall. There is growing consensus among business rule practitioners and thought leaders regarding the importance of the rule repository in developing a scalable, sustainable business rule management capability. This session will provide an overview of business rule repositories and identify the three “must have” capabilities for supporting an [...]

Cost, time and expertise are obstacles to business rules adoption. Corticon’s recently announced RulesWorld is designed to let individuals prove the value of rules without cost or risk. RulesWorld is an online community supplying learning materials, samples and forums as well as access to the software itself. All of this at no cost. Users can [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ I got an interesting comment on my recent post about the top 4 concerns of CIOs. Joanne makes a number of points in her comment that I thought should be addressed: a business rules engine is not nearly enough. What is needed instead is a means to model manage and measure the [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ I was reading an article on The top 10 CIO concerns and I was struck by the first four: Business productivity and cost reduction IT and business alignment Business agility and speed to market Business process re-engineering It seemed to me, reading this list, that all four of these were concerns that [...]

Syndicated from ebizQ Sharon Machlis had a great piece over on Computerworld titled Opinion: I’ve looked at code from both sides now on her experience of being a developer on a project where she was usually a user. It’s an interesting experience that she describes and I was struck particularly by a couple of comments. [...]

My friends at InRule have an interesting announcement today – they are partnering with a SharePoint-based Business Process Management Solution called ShareVis. The combination of SharePoint with ShareVis and InRule will, I believe, help companies take SharePoint from document management to forms automation and ultimately to real process management. The combination, still in its early [...]