simulation

Pervasive is a global software company with 200+ employees that has been profitable for the last 8 years and best known for btrieve (now Pervasive PSQL) and their data integration products. The company is busy expanding into new markets and Pervasive DataRush is one of their new products. They see a new generation of data [...]

Back in March FICO released 6.7 of their BRMS Blaze Advisor. I got a chance to catch up with the release just recently. The focus of this release was the business user experience – an improved out of the box experience for business users. The business user experience has become increasingly critical as business users [...]

ILOG and XM presented on optimization and business processes. Optimization in this context is about mathematical optimization aimed at decision support or Operations Research. Creating plans and schedules to optimize use of resources. Optimization helps business create best possible schedules or plans, explore their alternatives and understand trade-offs between conflicting goals. For instance, how much [...]

Nicolas Robbe came next to give some updates on the product roadmaps. To be honest what he mostly did was summarize recent developments – nothing really about futures. First he talked about optimization and CPLEX’s 20 year history. With CPLEX 11 they feel they can solve 70% of the very hardest optimization problems – way [...]

I just went back to check and found no predictions on the blog for 2008 (so I get a 100% accuracy rating with no errors) so I thought I would make some for 2009. In no particular order then: Cloud computing will impact decision management. There are already at least two decision management vendors offering [...]

Inspired by a post of Jim Sinur’s – Can the Business Really Use BPM Technologies Without Help? – I started thinking about the decision management corollary: Can the business use decision management technology without help? Regular readers will know that I often refer to the dirty secret of business rules: Business users don’t want to [...]

Tobin Gilman of Oracle presented on Oracle’s BI Strategy. Oracle views Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence as coming together over time and has a single strategy. They see ERP and CRM as having enabling operational efficiencies by driving a process-centric view across silos. Clearly BPM has completed this transition. Yet management processes – reporting, [...]

Predigy is a technology originally developed by Intelligent Results (founded in 2001) that was acquired by First Data in 2007. It was originally focused on the military (particularly on the analysis of unstructured data) but has subsequently moved into commercial applications. Predigy is now a decisioning platform with some applications in banking, collections, telecommunications and [...]

Not really live this post as I am working from notes I took – after all I was on the panel and it’s hard to participate and blog at the same time. Joining me on the panel were Don Baisley of Microsoft, Ron Ross and Jim Sinur (of Gartner) – Neil had to leave. We [...]

Michele Edelman of Discover presented on Building Blocks of Decision Management: “Tools to Rule”. Michele spends a lot of time educating people inside Discover and her team use sources like McKinsey to show executives why EDM matters. For instance, a report on top 10 macro-economic trends: Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly not just [...]

Graham Hill wrote a piece on Evidence-based CRM that focused on evidence-based CRM programs and it made me think about evidence-based CRM processes. To me, evidence-based CRM means customer relationships, and thus customer treatments, that are based on evidence (data) and not judgment, hope, guesswork etc. It means making offers that you have evidence this [...]

Well at least one more as of today – Jim Sinur, over on his Gartner blog – has finally started to use the phrase he has been threatening to use for a while “Intelligent Decision Management”. While Jim has not published a formal definition – I expect he will soon now he is back at [...]

Today Chordiant announced their new Visual Business Director (CxVBD). I saw an early prototype of this some months back and got a more detailed look at the finished product at their recent Customer Advisory Board. I really like CxVBD as I think it shows the critical business value of externalizing decisions. I have yet to [...]

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Last full session today is Lisa Kart and Jean Zoch of Fair Isaac talking about optimal pricing – balancing profitability with competitiveness. Lisa’s focus, she says, is on what makes price optimization work. Price optimization is a very broad topic, even in financial services, but their focus is on being able to target price for [...]

Jeff Jonas wrote an interesting post – Custom Software Scope Changes (Not) – that reminded me of my ongoing battle to argue that rules are not requirements. Jeff argues that we take far too little time designing custom software before we start to build it. A summary quote from his post illustrates his point: I [...]

The second part of my response to Dave Wright’s comment is about the kind of business one can run after one adopts EDM. To do this, let’s predicate the discussion a company that has adopted Enterprise Decision Management as a core management principle, implemented the technology and development approaches that support it and had long [...]

Last session for me today, indeed the last session before I go home, is Janelle Hill of Gartner and Kramer Reeves of IBM on improving agility through end-to-end process agility. Janelle went first sharing Gartner’s BPM Scenario for the next five years. She had two initial points: In 2013, do you know where your work [...]