Requirements

I am giving live Online training on Decision Modeling with DMN, May 12 – 14, 2015 10:00 am – 11:30 am PDT each day Decision modeling with the new Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standard is fast becoming the definitive approach for building more effective processes and for specifying requirements for business rules and predictive analytic projects. With [...]

I am giving a workshop tutorial at BBC 2015 on Business Analysis and Architecture with Decision Modeling Monday November 2, 1:30pm: The proven technique of decision modeling is fast becoming the go-to approach for extending business architectures and system requirements to include business decisions. Modeling business decisions as peers to business processes is central to accurately [...]

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. [...]

Ray Wang of Constellation Research published a report early this year “The Elements of Business Architecture for Digital Transformation.” In the report Ray identifies some interesting boardroom priorities (this is just some of them): Consistent Customer Experience Mass automation Insights-driven business models Cost-effective regulatory compliance All of these are reasons given by our clients as they invest [...]

I am giving a webinar on “Framing Analytic Requirements with Decision Modeling” April 2, 9am Pacific/Noon Eastern: One of the most important steps in a predictive analytic effort is correctly framing the problem a way that creates a shared understanding of the business problem across business, IT and analytics teams. Established analytic approaches such as CRISP-DM stress [...]

Back in May of last year, Wayne Eckerson published “Making Predictive Analytics Pervasive“. It’s a great report with some really useful data but one of the key headline result is that implementation rates are not rising – in fact fewer organizations are reporting successful implementation of predictive analytics (from 21% to 18%). This despite the [...]

One of my big focus areas right now is using decision requirements models to frame predictive analytic projects. We are working with a few insurance companies as well as a couple of manufacturing companies to apply decision requirements modeling in their analytic requirements process and I am excited by the potential. I recently wrote an article for [...]

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. First decision-led: Given the focus we saw [...]

I am speaking at PASS Business Analytics 2015, April 20-22 in Santa Clara CA,on A New Approach to Defining BI Requirements Most organizations lack an approach that lets them specify their requirements for BI or for analytics more broadly. Their ability to find opportunities for, and successfully use, more advanced analytics is limited. In this [...]

Tom Debevoise and I gave a webinar this week on 4 key benefits of using the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and the Decision Model and Notation (DMN) standards. We highlighted the power of these two standards in combination, specifically in terms of: Streamlined processes A combination of process modeling and decision modeling produces simpler [...]

Steve Knode of the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) and I will be talking about how you can use Decision Modeling to specify requirements for predictive analytic projects at 2:40pm on March 31, 2015 Establishing a shared understanding of the business problem across business, IT and analytics teams is critical for successful predictive analytics projects. Recently [...]

Decision modeling as part of the requirements phase or iteratively during agile projects makes it easier for business users to fully participate in Drools implementations and maintenance. If you missed our webinar, Engaging Business Users with Drools, the presentation and webcast are now available. In the webinar Mariano De Maio, CTO of Drools experts Plugtree and I present how [...]

Earlier this week we announced the release of the Enterprise Edition of our cloud-based decision modeling software, DecisionsFirst Modeler. This new Enterprise Edition extends our user-friendly, DMN standards-based graphical decision models by integrating them with implementation platforms such as business rules management systems (BRMS) and predictive analytic workbenches. By linking business user-friendly decision requirements models to often complex [...]

I am giving a webinar on Plugtree, on October 8 at 10am Pacific/1pm Eastern: Drools is a technically strong, high performance Business Rules Management System (BRMS). Drools has editors that can be configured so business analysts and business users can maintain and update business rules but many organizations trying to engage their business users in this [...]

I recently did some research on the requirements for enterprise-scale analytics and the challenges of using open source R in this context. In this first post I wanted to outline some of the requirements I see for enterprise scale analytics and in a second post I will discuss the challenges of R in that context. As advanced [...]

I am giving a webinar on Improve Your Process Models by Modeling Decisions for the IIBA on September 18 at 11am Eastern: Business analysts know that modeling business processes, rather than writing about them, defines them more accurately. Business process models make it easier to validate requirements, easier to see opportunities for improvement and easier to manage [...]

Check out this article – Business leaders need Rs not Vs: The 5 Rs of Big Data. I met Merritt,the author, at the TDWI Solution Summit on Advanced Analytics this spring. In the post, and in his subsequent work, he makes some great points. I really like his 5Rs and think they illustrate the power of [...]

Tracy Allison Altman over at Ugly Research has a great new  white paper – Data is easy: Deciding is hard – in which she quotes me (thanks Tracy). It’s a great paper and makes what I think is the critical point – that you don’t need a data culture but a decision culture. And I would add [...]

I am giving a tutorial on Decision Modeling with DMN: Extending BPMN to Decisions, Business Rules and Analytics at this year’s Building Business Capability conference in the afternoon of Sunday November 2. Decision Modeling has recently been added to the Business Analyst Body of Knowledge® Guide v3 while a new standard, the Decision Model and Notation [...]