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Smart (Enough) Systems

Book Review by Ade McCormack

Ade McCormack, author of The IT Value Stack (reviewed previously) and columnist at the FT in England, just reviewed the book for this blog. You can read his review of Smart (Enough) Systems over on his blog.

Neil Raden, Co-Founder here at Smart (enough) Systems, is joining John Russell, Chief Scientist of   expressor software on June 19, 2008 at 2 p.m. ET Here’s the blurb: Today’s data integration (DI) tools claim to offer significant benefits in implementation and ongoing support. However, design and specification consume much of the effort in a [...]

The folks at Intalio invited us to speak at their user conference June 17-18. We are presenting on Applying Decision Management to Make Processes Smarter, Simpler and More Agile on the first day. We would love to see you there so drop by and say hello if you are attending. Also we have a discount [...]

Tony, over on the Decision Support Analytics blog, is running an interesting competition and the prizes have just improved – Neil and I offered a signed copy of our book to add to his list of potential prizes. You can check out the details here. I plan to write a couple of entries soon and [...]

Two of Gartner’s smartest analysts – Kurt Schlegel and Gareth Herschel (shameless plug) – just published an excellent little paper called “Business Intelligence and Decision Making“. This paper was one of Gartner’s Strategic Planning Assumptions and the (free) summary says: A subset of organizations that seek a competitive advantage will evolve the primary role of [...]

Well today was Earth Day – you knew that, I hope. I knew because last week I was at John Muir’s house with a wonderful group of 4th/5th graders doing a simulation of his period. So, in the spirit of Earth Day, how are Enterprise Decision Management and Smart (enough) Systems “green”? If your marketing [...]

Howard Dresner, now independent but previously of Gartner and Hyperion and one of the leading voices in the Business Intelligence and Performance Management space listed Some good sources and included our book and our blogs (this one and Neil’s on Intelligent Enterprise). Thanks Howard.

This review in destinationCRM of iRobot’s automated customer service system – in which the system was given a 2008 Elite award – reminded me of an experience with a different iRobot system. iRobot’s return system is less award-worthy. Let me take you back a few months… At Christmas I took advantage of an iRobot offer [...]

I was checking out Doug Henschen’s interview of Kurt Schlegel – Gartner BI analyst – and page 2 was particularly excellent. Kurt clearly understands the value of being decision-centric and the need for BI to broaden to include rules and predictive analytics. And he plugged the book too, which is always appreciated. It’s a pity [...]

Mike Kavitz had a great post on his blog today Want SOA Success? Try this Recipe. I really liked the article, not least because it was clearly based on hard-won experience on Mike’s part. Reading it I saw how similar an Enterprise Decision Management or EDM success recipe would be. Research the living daylights out [...]

I am often asked the question in the title – what is a smart (enough) system? Here’s the list we use when we talk about it: Operational While one can make systems of all kinds “smarter” we are talking about making operational, transactional, high-volume, typically customer facing applications smart enough to be useful. Real-Time As [...]

First session today is Jayne Dutra of NASA on Re-Thinking Search in a Web 2.0 World. Jayne started by going over some of the basics, talking about web 1.0 with portals/websites/search moving to Web 2.0 with blogs, wikis, RSS, social networking and community portals. She used a Mills Davis slide that talked about web 3.0 [...]

This was my session. You can get a PDF of my slides or View them on SlideShare.

I saw a post with the title “Has Business Intelligence Outlived its Usefulness?” on Colin White’s blog and my first reaction was one of shock. On reading it, however, I see that Colin is taking aim not at BI in general but at the use of the phrase – a narrower and easier target! I [...]

CS TechCast is a podcast series released every Monday hosted by Eric Johnson, Eric Beehler, and Josh Jones. Each week they discuss the latest Information Technology trends and news, and bring you interviews with key members of the IT Community. This week they included a nice little interview with me and Neil about Smart (enough) [...]

I saw this post recently – “The fat tail will be human, the medium tail social, the long tail algorithmic” – in which Chris Anderson (author of The Long Tail) says “The short head will be human, the fat middle social and the long tail algorithmic”. This made me think some more about the role [...]

Two posts caught my eye last night – 5 questions a teenage kid might ask if starting work at your business today by Mike Sarokin on the EDS blog and Vinnie Mirchandarni’s follow up here. As the parent of a college student myself I had to chime in. It seems to me that not only [...]

Next month (February 24th – 26th), I am going to be attending ILOG’s user conference: I will be introducing and acting as host for a couple of sessions on best practices and giving a lunch and learn on Tuesday. I will be there the whole time, blogging from the BRMS track so look me up [...]

Ian Graham of Trireme reviewed Smart (enough) Systems for the British Computer Society’s magazine IT Now. You can read the online review here.

Book excerpted in BI Journal

For those of you who get TDWI‘s BI Journal, the most recent issue has an except from Smart (Enough) Systems titled “Inside Enterprise Decision Management“