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There was a great article in Predictive Analytics Times recently by my friend Dean Abbott – A Good Business Objective Beats a Good Algorithm. Dean, like me, talks about the importance of the “three legged stool” of business, analytics and IT. But it was the title that particularly struck me. As Dean says, it’s easy to [...]

I recently checked out The Evolution of Decision Making – How leading organizations are adopting a data-driven culture, a new white paper from the Harvard Business Review sponsored by SAS: People have long preached the benefits of relying on data and insights from business intelligence (BI) and analytics to help make better and timelier decisions. A reliance [...]

I got an update on Marketswitch Optimization as part of my series on marketing decision management solutions. Experian positions Marketswitch Optimization for the most advanced stage of decisioning– as clients move from profiling and segmenting their customers, to predictive scoring and business rules to optimization. They see some interesting numbers for improvement through this lifecycle [...]

My old friend David Raab just published a new white paper The Customer Data Platform: A new foundation for customer management (download for free with registration from ReachForce). In this paper David reiterates the power of marketing automation with some great stats on how much better companies that apply marketing automation perform when it comes to [...]

Earlier this week I posted on the value of decision requirements modeling in analytic projects when it comes to coping with some of the analytic skills shortages people face. But this is not the only reason to focus on decision requirements if you are focused on predictive analytics and data mining.  In fact decision requirements modeling [...]

Decision optimizer is one of FICO’s Decision Management Tools and is designed to address some specific challenges in customer decisioning, particularly that there are often competing objectives and very large numbers of customers (and thus customer decisions) involved. Combine this with the many possible action combinations, uncertainty about what customers might do, as well as [...]

I have been getting a bit behind with my blogging and tweeting recently but I was struck by a comment on Howard Dresner’s thread (@howarddresner) based on preliminary results from his survey (http://wisdomsurvey.com). #BetterDecisionMaking (so far) is the top goal for #BusinessIntelligence – wisdomsurvey.com #BIWisdom — Howard Dresner (@howarddresner) March 8, 2013 and Boris Evelson [...]

I will be giving a webinar with Don Perkins, an experienced business rules consultant, on Re-inventing Business Requirements with Decision Management, Wednesday November 28 at 11am Pacific/2pm Eastern: Effectively capturing and managing requirements is critical in any IT project. Business analysts and others gathering requirements know how to capture and document processes, data and user tasks. [...]

Big Data is a big topic these days. The combination of predictive analytics and Big Data should create new opportunities for more specific, future-oriented analysis of large amounts of data to create actionable insight. Yet most organizations are not combining predictive analytics and Big Data in this way and I think this is because they are trying [...]

I recently got an update from the team at Sparkling Logic. I first blogged about them back in 2011. As noted previously, the product is built on a collaborative, social platform in which people work on multiple projects. Different roles are supported, allowing everyone to have their own todos and for teams to share these [...]

The TIBCO Spotfire blog had a nice post – Tips to Get Your Organization Ready for Big Data – and it struck me that these tips were all good advice for someone trying to do “Big Decision Management” – that is Decision Management with Big Data. I would add a few comments though: Collaboration is [...]

Dean Abbot wrote a great post recently “Why Defining the Target Variable in Predictive Analytics is Critical” in which he referenced the CRISP-DM approach to building predictive analytic models and talked about the importance of target variable selection in building an effective model. The thrust of Dean’s post was the crucial point that because The [...]

FICO Model Central is the latest addition to FICO’s Decision Management platform and is focused on lifecycle management of predictive analytic models in the context of an overall Decision Management implementation. The original driver was a growing regulatory requirement in the banking industry to have a regular cycle of model validation and monitoring of predictive [...]

In a recent article over on All Analytics – Analytics-Business Alignment Needs Work – Beth Schultz discussed a set of Gartner predictions written up by Doug Laney. In particular she highlights Gartner’s finding that companies cited …aligning BI initiatives with corporate strategy and objectives nearly three times as often as they called out technology-related issues [...]

Eric Yau kicked off the business analytics keynote today, saying that they are going to focus in on the 3+3 areas discussed yesterday and with that he introduced Deepak Advani. Deepak introduced some key IT trends – rising data volumes, high volume decisions that require decision automation and LOB demanding more flexibility and independence – [...]

Brian McDonough of IDC talked about the drivers for pervasive BI in organizations. He identified various metrics for measuring pervasiveness. Each of these could be assessed (from beginner to expert for instance) to see how well an organization is doing. Data Update Frequency Percent of Power Users Degree of Internal Use Degree of External Use [...]

Working with clients it is clear that the interest in analytics has never been greater than it is today. Yet there is still confusion about what analytics means. We have web analytics to analyze logs and clickstream data to optimize websites; data mining and predictive analytics to analyze structured data to segment customers and to [...]

A number of customers participated in a panel of analytics success stories. Each one was interesting and powerful in its own right and each prompted a Decision Management suggestion for someone at that stage in developing and deploying analytics. Argos Risk is a web-based online subscription risk management service. Argos offers actionable risk insight for [...]

There are a number of great events related to Decision Management themes and technology platforms this October. Here’s my list so far for October 2011 Teradata Partners Conference and Expo 2-6 October, San Diego, CA This is a great conference for anyone using or considering Teradata. I assume that this year there will be a [...]