AI is a hot topic and we get asked a lot by clients how they can succeed with AI or cognitive technology. There’s often a sense of panic – “everyone is doing AI and we’re not!” – and a sense that they have to start a completely separate initiative, throw money at it and hope [...]
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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 [...]
Second keynote at IBM’s World of Watson is on the role of cloud and data as the foundation for cognitive systems and businesses. Bob Picciano from IBM’s analytics business kicked things off. Bob began with a discussion of how IT’s value has changed – from a focus on processing and how fast/cheap it can be done to a [...]
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 am attending IBM Insight 2015 and will blog about a few of the sessions. First up, the opening keynote on the insight economy. IBM is focusing on the disruption caused by analytics and insight across all industries. Internal and external data and increasingly sophisticated analytics are changing how companies interact with customers, manage risk [...]
I got an update from Yseop recently, having last been briefed back in August 2013.Yseop has repackaged its capabilities into two products – Yseop Smart NLG (Natural Language Generation) and Yseop Smart Machine. Yseop Smart NLG is software that turns data into text and narrative, primarily working in finance, business analytics and business intelligence while [...]
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 [...]
Last up an executive panel focused on Watson Analytics: How much data, how complex or what kind of data drives value from Watson Analytics? Self-service is core to the value proposition more than the kind of data or volume of data If you have only a little data then one of the interesting aspects is [...]
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 [...]
Dave Laverty kicked off IBM’s big Watson Analytics announcement event in New York. The focus today, he says, is the reinvention of the analytic experience with a degree of simplicity that puts analytic power in the hands of everyone. Bob Picciano joined him to make the key announcements. Back in January IBM announced the Watson business unit, a vertically [...]
Continuing the IBM Big Data and Analytics event we come to Watson. Watson is designed to understand natural language, human-style communication. Watson then trawls through a potentially very large amount of material to create and score some hypotheses as answers for these questions and returns them. With each interaction it also learns what works, what the better answer [...]
I am going to attend and blog a few sessions at the Building Business Capability conference. First up are folks from Unum talking about how they are evolving their business rules management policies and practices. Unum is a group of life and health insurance companies, mostly in the US but also in the UK and [...]
I recently caught up with Yseop (“Easy-op”), artificial intelligence software designed to write the way a human would do helping turn analytics and other information into natural language. Yseop was founded in 2008 by a technologist and an angel investor but the product is based on over 20 years of research. Yseop is headquartered in [...]
After a couple of customer conversations Stephen Gold of IBM came back on time to discuss Watson. I have blogged about Watson a couple of times (including this one on what Watson means for decision management). Recently IBM has started working with clients around customer engagement, not least because it has become increasingly practical to [...]
Bob Picciano and Les Rechan came up next to discuss Big Data and Analytics: Fueling Competitive Advantage in the New Era of Smart. Five years ago IBM launched the Smarter Planet initiative. On a smarter planet, they say, everything is connected and instrumented and this is reflected in the explosion of Big Data. To drive value [...]
Saffron Technology is focused on prediction and sense making using associative memories. Associative Memories automate cognitive thinking by building connections and counts from large amounts of data. Saffron Technology uses a NoSQL / schema free approach and have developed technology to reason in real time by recalling the connections in the context of the raw [...]
Be Informed recently gave me an update on their progress. Based in the Netherlands, they were founded back in 2002 and they released 4.0 last year and have been focused on building a large number of projects across Europe, especially in the Netherlands. Focus areas are public sector and financial services. They are over 200 [...]
IBM has two core Decision Management products, Operational Decision Management and Analytical Decision Management. As noted yesterday CIOs see a need to drive better real time decisions while CEOs see the need to differentiate their organizations by translating insight into actions (by making decisions). The Decision Management solutions are focused on optimizing decisions – not [...]
Stephen Gold came up next to talk about Watson. Watson is transitioning from a proof of concept – a grand challenge project – to a business solution. This is being driven primarily by the rapid expansion in unstructured, uncertain data. Not just a need to process new data sources, also about being able to reason [...]
Progress Corticon Business Rules Management System (BRMS) v5.2 was delivered in February and focused on key enhancements for natural language support, mobility, and Progress Software integration. Since the first version nearly a decade ago, Corticon has focused on offering easy-to-use tools to express and manage decision making logic. The Corticon business rules expression language is [...]
