iteration

I am speaking at the Global Big Data Conference in Santa Clara, CA in March on Don’t Apply Big Data Analytics To The Wrong Problem: Put Decisions First One of the biggest challenges for analytics Teams is effective communication with their business partners. Too many projects fail to connect problems in the business environment to [...]

Jerome Boyer of IBM presented a methodology – Best Practices for Managing a Cognitive Business Operations (CBO) Journey Proven Method. Cognitive, in this context, is about extracting intent from unstructured text using natural language and thus improve process execution. By adding Watson services to a BPM/ODM installation, organizations can improve interactions, improve assignments, improve advice and deliver faster reactions. For [...]

I presented on the lessons we have learned deploying decision management and decision modeling at scale at various clients, specifically some large financial institutions. We have some case study like papers available (contact us for a copy) and here are the key takeaways: Decision Modeling Widely Accessible, Collaborative Lots of people can build and use [...]

I recently did some research on the requirements for enterprise-scale analytics and the challenges of using open source R in this context. In my first post (Requirements for Enterprise Scale Analytics with R – Part 1) I outline some of the requirements I see for enterprise scale analytics. In this second post I will discuss the challenges of R [...]

There was a fascinating piece in the Economist last week – Little things that mean a lot. This piece really resonated with me – even the title sounds a lot like my mantra of “Big Data, Little Decisions” (you can see a selection of the articles and webinars I have given on this topic here). So what were [...]

Brad Strock of PayPal presented on innovation. He laid out the three stages of money: Money 1.0 is what you might call traditional coinage and notes. Money 2.0 was the credit revolution with revolving debt, credit and debit cards etc. These have become the pre-eminent means of payment for many people. Money 3.0 is what PayPal [...]

The old way: Business rules projects begin by analyzing all the business rules in a business area. A set of techniques are applied to identify common terms across the whole business and to document every rule. A big book of rules is created that defines the rules for the business, generally in a defined syntax [...]

I recently caught up with Andrea Scarso, co-founder and COO of MoneyFarm. MoneyFarm is a startup whose target is to modernize and democratize the European panorama of retail investment services, leveraging the opportunities offered by the web and by process automation. Andrea designed the main decisioning processes. What’s your background, how did you come to be working in analytics? [...]

I went to listen to the folks from Cardinal Health talking about their supply chain and their use of BPM, Decision Management and analytics. Cardinal Health delivers products to medical facilities with 60,000 sites delivered to daily, 86% of US hospitals use them and 30,000 employees are involved. Cardinal Health is focused on helping improve cost-effectiveness and quality of [...]

Daryl Plummer gave the closing keynote – “If I had a time machine”. He began by differentiating between science fiction and fantasy – science fiction being a vision of the future that is based on some extrapolation of currently understood science and facts. Fantasy is completely based on the whims of the visionary. What he [...]

Tom Davenport kicked off the second day of Predictive Analytics World with a keynote on the new era of quantitative, or data-driven business. Various analytic threads – web analytics, HR analytics, actuarial, predictive marketing and supply chain – are coming together in really what is best described as Enterprise analytics. The world is changing and [...]

I got an update from the folks at FICO on the new release of Model Builder, their predictive analytics workbench. My last update was for Blaze Advisor 6.9 and Model Builder 7.0 and this release, Model Builder 7.1, is the first point release for Model Builder on the new 7.x platform. For those of you [...]

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 [...]

Sue Gonella presented on some efficiencies in building predictive scorecards. In particular she covered the   use of sampling data vs using all records into a model development exercise. Rather than using all records she advocated using stratified random sampling where a sample of each group of interest is used to build and validate the [...]

I got an interesting series of questions from a reader that seemed to me to justify a longish post. The initial question was quite harmless looking: Can you give a clue as to what software engineering approach you use/recommend for EDM, but especially business rules that non-IT staff can alter safely? But the whole thing [...]

One of my regular readers had a question today about Enterprise Decision Management and the Software Development Lifecycle – the EDMSDLC if you like. Here’s what he asked: We do Business Rules in our approach… I guess one question would be, where does EDM fit in a typical SDLC? [company] does Requirements, we have a [...]

OutSystems came to my attention at the Forrester IT Forum as they were suggested as a tool with good support for what Forrester calls Dynamic Business Applications. Founded in 2001 they have 100+ customers mostly in Portugal and the Netherlands but increasingly also in the US. Of these they identify 17 existing customers that have [...]

When I talk to folks about decision management they sometimes seem intimidated by the complexity of the problem and the sophistication of organizations that have invested heavily in the approach. Here, then, are some thoughts to help you get started. Begin – even if the first version is not perfect or even close. Automate the [...]