knowledge

ACTICO has just released ACTICO Modeler 8 – the latest version of the product previously known as Visual Rules for Finance (see most recent review here). ACTICO Modeler is a project-based IDE. ACTICO users can now select whether to create a “classic” Rule Modeling project or a Decision Model and Notation (DMN) project. The DMN [...]

Back in November I posted a humorous Thanksgiving guest decision model to LinkedIn. I just repeated the exercise with a decision model to help you assess a New Year’s Resolution. While these are just for fun, I thought it might be worth sharing how I built this one. Normally we like to work top-down talking [...]

All industry standards offer interchange. Successful standards offer skills interchange not just a technical interchange format. The Decision Model and Notation (DMN) decision modeling standard has a published XML interchange format, of course, and several of the committee’s members are working really hard to iron out the remaining issues and make the XML interchange more [...]

I have been working on Decision Management since we first started using the phrase back in 2002 – I’m probably the guilty party behind the phrase – and Decision Management Solutions (the company I run) does nothing but Decision Management. This gives us a unique perspective on new technologies and approaches that show up. One [...]

I am delighted to announce that Jan Purchase, founder of Lux Magi, and I have finished what we believe is the definitive guide to decision modeling with the Object Management Group’s Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard, Real-World Decision Modeling with DMN. The book is now on general release and available for purchase from Amazon and Barnes [...]

Continuing blogging from Building Business Capability and it’s time for Jan Vanthienen to talk decision modeling for the business analyst. Jan is a leading researcher into decision modeling and decision tables at the University of Leuven. Observation 1: Decisions are important for business, not only processes. Too often, he says, the process is modeled with no [...]

Continuing with blogs from Building Business Capability I am self-blogging the session I co-presented with David Herring, who leads the Process Transformation and Decision Management Program at a leading Northern California Healthcare organization, on “Pioneering Decision Services with Decision Modeling”. David works at a large not-for-profit health plan that does everything from inpatient, to home [...]

Continuing to blog at Building Business Capability 2016 with Ron Ross talking about operational excellence. [My comments in italics] He began by talking about the new technology available and its potential while expressing worries that technologies, and technological approaches, might not really change our businesses for the better. In particular he expressed concern that “channel mania” might [...]

Neil Ward-Dutton of MWD Advisors kicked off the day at IBM’s Process Summit talking about digital transformation and business processes.  Neil began with a key point – that “Digital Transformation” is more than just hype but that it is also a complicated and multi-faceted concept. Companies are being digitally disrupted because the internet and mobile [...]

One of the most persistent problems with decision modeling in my experience is the tendency of people to think of decision modeling as a one-time requirements effort. Many teams are convinced that building a decision model using the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard (white paper here) is going to help them with their business rules [...]

As you may have noticed I am working on a new book – Available now! Real-World Decision Modeling with DMN – with Jan Purchase. Yesterday Jan had a great blog post – Why Decision Modeling? (In 1000 Words). Jan makes some great points, emphasizing the value of  decision modeling with DMN in: Transparency of the logic Separation  of [...]

Sometimes Scott Adams just nails it and late last year I saw this great strip on The Generic Graph. Work with analytics long enough and you see something akin to this – something Mychelle Mollot of Klipfolio called Building a One-size-fits-all Dashboard – one of the 6 mistakes she talks about in this article that she pithily summarizes as the “this sucks for [...]

I got a briefing from a company that’s new to the US but that I have been aware of for a while – BusinessOptics. The company was founded in South Africa and started about four years ago. The product itself was first released about two years ago and the initial customers are primarily in South [...]

Paul Harmon of BPTrends had an interesting post last month – What Techniques Should a Process Methodology Support? – that made me want to make a pitch for decision modeling as a core technique for process modelers. In his article he quotes a friend as saying that this friend “didn’t include Decision Management (or Business Rules) in process, [...]

A long time ago I came across a company called Erudine and blogged about the Erudine Behaviour Engine. At that time, Erudine came out of the defence, aerospace and nuclear power industries where the slightest mistake can lead to disaster. Today, Erudine’s more recent focus has been in the banking, financial services and investment sectors. [...]

As part of my recently completed research on the analytic capability landscape, I introduced an approach to selecting analytic capability that is decision-led, role-centric and style-based. I go into the approach more in the research report but I wanted to highlight a few points in a series of blog posts. Next up role-centric: Decision-making problems can be solved [...]

Second day at Insight 2014 and the opening keynote is about transforming your industry. Mike Rhodin kicked things off by discussing how people think – by observing, interpreting what we see based on our experience and biases, and then we decide what we are going to do.  But there is a limit to how well we can do [...]

Steve Gold came up to talk about how IBM Watson. Watson, of course, started with the focus on analyzing unstructured data to present hypotheses and learn from the results. Watson brought together lots of IBM projects and technology and Watson Analytics is similar – a combination of various technologies and projects to solve a new problem. [...]

Next up a customer panel with cspire, xo communications and Purdue University. First question was what new things can you do with Watson Analytics? Easily convert data into a story in the context of a business The cloud supports a very distributed workforce allowing  more people to access more advanced analytics Empowering people who would [...]