Enterprise Decision Management - a Weblog

This is why predictive analytics matters...

I saw this today - California Auto Bill Passes Assembly Insurance Committee - and it prompted me to ask some of my insurance analytic friends. Here's what they came up with: There is a clear opportunity for Predictive Analytics to...

Users look to offer BI access to customers, partners - WHY?

I saw this article in Computerworld - Users look to offer BI access to customers, partners - and the title made me ask "Why?". Now I don't want to seem like I am criticizing the products or companies described -...

No wonder insurance is so expensive....

ake I saw this today - Ark. Reminds Insurers of Anti-Money Laundering Responsibilities. The article had a key piece about what insurance companies should do: At a minimum, insurance companies subject to the rule requiring an anti-money laundering program must...

What the people REALLY want

A good friend of mine, Ken Molay over at Webinar Success, spotted this article Times have changed, technology needs to follow about the need for new technological solutions as work shifts increasingly to knowledge work. "86% feel they are being...

EDM and your Digital Business Architecture

I was reading some work by Randy Heffner and his colleagues at Forrester recently on Digital Business Architecture - here and here. He defines a Digital Business Architecture as: An IT Architecture centered on business metadata on which IT solutions...

Reduce Fraud? Use EDM...

Interesting article in Insurance Journal ABI Calls for "Radical Action" to Reduce U.K. Fraud talking about insurance fraud costing each family in the UK $1,000 annually. The article talks about some steps that could be taken to improve this situation....

Sense and Respond with business rules

Christian Plaichner wrote a nice article recently in DM Review about Agile Business Process Management with Sense and Respond. There's lots of good stuff in the article but I do think one "clarification" is called for. In many cases it...

Oracle's view on business rules and SOA

Interesting article in Enterprise Architect this month - Rules Evolution in Service-Oriented Architecture - by Bruce Lowenthal. It's a great article and I don't have much to add to Bruce's comments, so instead I will refer to you to other...

If only they had used rules...

Ian Graham (of Trireme) pointed out a great example of a government project that should have used business rules - Jobcentre Plus misses deadline. This story, courtesy of the British Government, tells of a simple increase in an allowance that...

Live from Brainstorm (almost): Business Process Management, SOA, and Composite Applications

Ken Vollmer of Forrester Research gave a nice presentation on Business Process Management, SOA, and Composite Applications. I particularly liked both the phrase "Digital Business Architecture" to describe these general trends and his comment that we are finally able to...

Live from Brainstorm (almost): The role of business rules in Enterprise Architecture

Larry Goldberg, of KPI, gave a presentation on the role of business rules in Enterprise Architecture, leaning on both the Rule Maturity Model KPI has developed and the Zachman Framework. Larry spent quite a lot of time on the various...

Live from Brainstorm (almost): The Rules of Automated Underwriting

Mike Koscielny of Auto Club Group gave a great presentation on the value of business rules. As I have described his case before - here - I won't go into too much detail but there were a couple of points...

Live from Brainstorm: Business Rules and Business Process - Perfect together or perfect apart?

I sat on a panel today about business rules and business process and whether they should be separate or combined. I already have a couple of posts on this topic - here and here - so regular readers (both of...

Live from Brainstorm: The Vision for Business Rules

Barb von Halle gave this excellent overview of business rules. She again showed the KPI Rule Maturity Model. She reviewed some very relevant results from a survey of companies that KPI did around the leading reasons for adopting rules to...

Live from Brainstorm: Making the transition to services engineering

In Brett Champlin's session on the Making the transition to services engineering this morning. A couple of interesting points came up in his discussions of how the processes of delivering services are different from those of delivering products. 90% of...

Live from Brainstorm: BPM/SOA/BRM/EA/OPM

Well I am at the Brainstorm BPM/SOA/EA/BRM/OPM conference in Chicago today and tomorrow and just attended the opening panel discussion where the various track chairs discussed how all these pieces fit together. There was a fairly nice picture of the...

A Rule (or even many rules) does not a decision make

David Straus wrote a nice article in Business Integration Journal this month - A Rule Does Not a Decision Make "Rarely is a single business rule the basis for making any decision. More often, many rules interact to form a...

Technorati update

Working through some Technorati stuff and need to put this Technorati Profile link into a post. Sorry about that....

Decision-Support or Decision Automation (or both)

An old colleague of mine, John Parkinson (hi John) writes in CIO Insight and recently posted this article on Decision-Support Systems: Lessons from the Military. I remember John telling me this story once before years ago and his column on...

Enterprise Decision Management and the Payments process

Interesting article on the payments process in Bank Technology News - Collapsing the Payments Process for an Enterprise-Wide View of the Business. One of the key approaches identified is "Process automation and support driven by a dynamic rules engine", with...

Take a Gamble with EDM

James Taylor – great fount of EDM truisms, from whom all rules- and analytics-based wisdom flows – likes to ask a question. It sounds like it should set up the punchline to a joke, but unfortunately it doesn’t. “How do...

Some great McKinsey stats on call center automation

Another nice McKinsey piece today - Automated self-service comes to telcos (registration required). In particular it has some nice numbers: A typical call-center transaction costs $8 to $10; the same transaction online costs $0.15 to $0.80 Printed bills cost four...

Segmentation in insurance - knowledge management or operational challenge?

Insurance and Technology carried an interesting article by Cynthia Saccocia, Research Director in Tower Group's Insurance Practice - Know Your Customers. This summarized a key trend for insurers - approaching demographic bubble in retirees - but really focused on the...

Dell, healthcare and decision automation

Interesting piece in Business Week - Dell Takes Health Care Online - about Dell's use of technology in helping its employees manage their health. There is a clear movement to the use of Consumer Directed Health Plans (CDHPs) and this...

Mr. Disney, Be A Member in OUR Club

For many people, this story must be some kind of dream: free episodes of "Desperate Housewives" available on the net? (Disney to Make TV Shows Available Free on Web.) "In an effort to extend its broadcast economic model to the...

Analytics and business process management

Recently wrote this article on the BPM Institute site - Bringing Analytics into Processes Using Business Rules. I won't repeat myself but suffice it to say that using business rules to automate the key decision points in a process is...

Segmentation, segmentation, segmentation

This post - Segmenting Customer Support Services Yields Higher Financial Returns, Says ServiceXRG - caught my eye over on the Tekrati weblog. "Customer service programs and practices based on customer segmentation yield higher support contract value and performance" This is...

Pin All Your Romantic Hopes on Google - With Contextual Marketing and EDM, Presumably?

I have to admit that, when I first ran across this site (http://www.google.com/romance/) early on Saturday, April 1, I was taken in for at least 15 seconds - probably because I wanted so much for it to be true. Not...

Welcome Ian Turvill as a guest author

Well it had to happen - another author joins the team. Ian Turvill, a colleague here at Fair Isaac, is an expert on applying EDM to solving marketing problems, among other things. He is also a regular collaborator of mine...

Book Review: Use Cases - Requirements in Context

This second edition of the book is on how to gather and define requirements using a process based on use cases. The book outlines an iterative approach to using use cases and adapted and evolved based on real experience of...

Location, Location... Automation

In Location, Location, Location Joe Francica, Editor-in-Chief of Directions Media writes about how location intelligence can enhance BI scenarios. The article does a nice job of discussing how adding location information and visualizations of same can really enhance the value...

Speaking at Brainstorm on keeping rules and process separate

I am participating in Barb von Halle's panel on "Business Rules and Business Process - perfect together or perfect apart", part of the Brainstorm Chicago event. Barb and I recently gave a webinar on this topic available on the BPM...

Customer Loyalty, EDM and "the corner store"

Jim Berkowitz writes in Customer Loyalty and Profitability that "To grow truly loyal customers ... what's needed is the 'Mom & Pop Store' factor". He goes on to say that while this is not possible the way it once was,...

Event Processing and Business Rules (and EDM)

Gene Weng sent me this great link on Complex Event Processing (CEP) - Workshop on Event Processing - Presentations and asked me some good questions. Some presentations mentioned rules as one way to process events - are they? This is...

More rules in more platforms

Interesting to see that JBoss has jumped on the rules bandwagon as reported, for instance in InfoWorld JBoss enhances middleware line. Following on from the inclusion by Microsoft and Oracle of basic rules engines in their platform products this is...

BPO growing, needs EDM perhaps to grow faster

This article in ComputerWorld made me think about EDM and BPO again - BPO Deals Increase, but Users Face Hurdles. Two things struck me particularly: If BPO vendors offer more and more standard processes then those that allow their customers...

Gareth Herschel of Gartner and CRM experiences

Gareth Herschel blogged today - Two Stores, Two Contrasting Experiences - about how both the attitude of an employee and the systems at their disposal affect the customer experience. I think his story shows exactly why some of these operational...

High Tech CRM needs EDM

I saw an ad today for a session on the specific problems and issues of CRM in High-Tech companies. This made me think about Enterprise Decision Management and why it is so relevant in the solving of CRM problems faced...