Enterprise Decision Management - a Weblog

Enterprise Decision Management and Alerts

Larry Goldman makes some interesting points in his article on alerts - Red Alert! All Hands Battle Stations! - and it made me think about alerts in an EDM context.

Using EDM to give bank customers what they want

In Banks Get Their Bearings Online Evan Schuman covers some of the positive news on how banks are starting to "get it" online. Although much of the article covers web design and other related topics, a couple of quotes leapt out at me as pointing up the value of an Enterprise Decision Management approach.

Get set for change time - use business rules!

Thinking about change time, what happens to services once they are deployed, leads naturally to a discussion of business rules.

Blaze Advisor and RulesPower combined

Exciting news today as Fair Isaac announces the acquisition of RulesPower. This brings the speed of the RETE III engine to Blaze Advisor as well as some other innovative technologies around rules verification and completeness checking. More to come obviously but pretty cool I think.

Thoughts on the Teradata Conference

I saw this article by Charles Garry today in CIO Insight. Like Charles I spent the week at the Teradata Partners conference and like him was struck by how business focused the IT folks at the show were.

Decision Yield as a way to measure ROI

Decision Yield is an evaluation metric that reveals the quality of your current decisions and decision processes, and helps you plan, justify and measure improvements. Why do we need one? Well, what constitutes a good decision? Is it the outcome alone? The cost of executing that decision? The speed? How about the coordination of multiple decisions across different parts of your organization?

What is Rete III?

Rete III is the most advanced commercially-available inference engine, benchmarking more than 300% faster than its competitors, making it the ideal solution for organizations managing large, complex business rule sets, where high performance is critical. Benchmark programs test the ability...

Data Mining in Insurance

Interesting article in Business 2.0 about Allstate's use of Data Mining. What is not brought out in the article is that in order to get value from this data mining, Allstate had to use it to improve a transactional decision...

Insurance Cross-Sell and EDM

This article on the slow progress insurance is making towards cross-selling effectively caught my eye today. The article highlights many of the problems that insurers face in broadening their relationship with their customers and with then using their data and...

What is an Analytic Application?

Do analytic applications need to include dashboards?

Windows Workflow Foundation - rule engines and rule management

WWF has a rules engine and makes it clear why process automation required business rules. A rules management solution is still key to decision-heavy processes, however.

Limits on Prediction?

This article by Seth Grimes caught my attention while at the Teradata Partners show - Limits on Prediction. In it Seth discusses what some of the limitations of predictive analytics might be, a topic much in mind here at the...

IT Priorities, leaders and EDM

This article in Computerworld - Are IT Priorities in the Wrong Place? struck me as I was reviewing my email newsletters today. Several aspects of leaders identified in the article struck me as particularly relevant for those of you wondering if EDM is right for you.

Still little technology use in Risk Management

Technology is clearly underused in risk management, based on this recent survey.

CRM Analytics and EDM - a Gartner perspective

Gartner's perspective on some of the challenges on real-time or right-time CRM analytics mesh with core EDM concepts.

Identity Theft and EDM

A posting on identity theft caught my eye and made me decide to write something about the use of an EDM in spotting and preventing identity theft. Check out my new entry in my "What do people do with this" blog on "Preventing Identity Theft"

Preventing Identity Theft

Identity theft is a hot topic these days. There is a lot of talk about steps you can take to help prevent it - myFICO has a great set of suggestions for instance - and one can also be very...

Industry Nears Plug-and-Play BPM

There has been a lot of talk about how BPM technology and the combination of process modeling, BPM technology, decent analysis tools etc make it possible for companies to adopt a combination of their own unqiue processes and industry-wide best practices. What most of these do NOT discuss is the issue of decision-making in these processes.

Working on the railroad - an InfoWorld horror story

Business rules can be a way to avoid nightmares like one highlighted in the InfoWorld "Off the record" column.

Customer Intent Driven Organizations

Moving CRM systems to support an intent-driven organization requires the adoption of a customer-centric approach AND Enterprise Decision Management.

PDC goes with the flow | InfoWorld | News | 2005-09-14 | By Eric Knorr

Microsoft's announcement of Windows Workflow Foundation marks an interesting approach to tying desktop apps into an enterprise app - all you need is business rules.

Real-time risk management

EDM brings real-time risk management to the enterprise.

The Joy of Flex - Editorial - CIO

John Hagel and John Seely Brown make some great points on developing a loosely coupled enterprise in this article on The Joy of Flex - Editorial - CIO. I firmly believe that one of the key ingredients in a loosely coupled enterprise is going to be how well defined its decision-making processes are.

Ameritrade COO Talks About Business-Technology Mix - Computerworld

Business rules management systems are a way to get even old legacy systems to 70% new, 30% maintenance.

State of Ajax: Progress, Challenges, and Implications for SOAs

Business rules complement Ajax by allowing for business users to maintain the rules about their data and by allowing developers to share them across client and server.

How do business analysts maintain business rules?

The business analyst is responsible for defining the business processes which will be supported and then gathering and organizing the business rules that will provide the foundation for the application planning process. This list of rules will typically be in...

What can you use business rules for?

There is a huge range of solutions that can be built better with business rules. I discuss some of them, and try and post new interesting ones, here in my What do people do with this blog. Some examples might...

New FAQs

Updated the Business Rules FAQ today.

What types of decisions in the mortgage industry can use EDM?

There are many mortgage decisions that can use business rules or business rules and analytics in combination. Here are some examples. Underwriting Business rules have been used to implement underwriting for sub-prime products - often in conjunction with analytics. For...

How can a business rules solution enable compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPAA or similar?

A formalized, auditable collection of rules for collecting and acting upon information is central to the requirements of regulatory mandates such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. Companies must ensure and enforce compliance by every employee, for every transaction, and in every...

The Changing User Interface

AJAX is a great technology combination for dynamic user interfaces on the web - but only if you can manage the business rules used in the forms correctly. SmartForms let's you do that.

CRM Today: Data Spiders Hit Their Stride In Segmenting Customer Data for Marketers

My colleague Rahul Asthana has an article in CRM Today: Data Spiders Hit Their Stride In Segmenting Customer Data for Marketers. This discusses an interesting analytic technique for generating the variables needed to make predictions. Highly recommended for those wondering...

Insurance and business rules

Business rules have great value to Insurance companies like Auto Club Group and a Celent report discusses how to use business rules and analytics to transform underwriting.

Insurance Underwriting - pushing decisions to the point of contact

Auto Club Group, a AAA insurer, has used business rules to automate underwriting decisions - a classic business rules scenario. LIke many insurers they were manually reviewing 100% of their policy requests.As they expanded into new markets they needed to...

Insurance, SOA and business rules

An article about IBM donating insurance process definitions to ACORD shows how Insurance is adopting standards like XML (through ACORD/SPX) and how keen it is to develop modern, Service-Oriented Architectures.

Competing on Analytics

An article discusses how companies can compete on analytics and this implies a move to an Enterprise Decision Management backbone

Is Orchestration tailor-made for business rules?

Business Rules are ideal both for orchestration in SOA and for delivering specialized services that focus on business decisions.

Business Intelligence Pipeline | Survey Says, 'Follow The BPM Template'... To A Point

Combining business rules with BPM can square the circle of using BPM templates v customization.

Sarbannes-Oxley Ideas and Suggestions

Recent surveys by AMR on SOX compliance as we enter year 2 put the focus on automation. Business rules is a key technology in this approach.

Self Service and EDM

Self-service and high-quality CRM require EDM technologies to support multi-channel, sophisticated customer decisioning.

More proof that the business rules market is hot

Stephen Hendrick of IDC previews his upcoming detailed market analysis by highlighting both how fast the market is growing and how dominant Fair Isaac and ILOG are.

Banks Worldwide Plan to Overhaul Aging Core Banking Systems to Gain Competitive Advantage, According to Global Survey

This survey shows why EDM, business rules and predictive analytics will be key technologies as banks innovate their core systems.

Business Rules and Metadata

Why is it important to be able to extend the metadata for business rules artifacts? Traceability, manageability, integration.

"Application Development Without Programmers"

Application development with business rules does not mean no programmers, it just empowers business users to manage key elements of their system themselves.

Analytic Applications growing fast

The market for analytic applications is growing fast according to IDC and this market needs business rules and predictive analytics - EDM