Enterprise Decision Management - a Weblog

Decisioning in a loosely-coupled process

Jack van Hoof had a great article today - How to implement a loosely coupled process flow (EDA). A great illustration of how to use a decision service to loosely couple. I have blogged about SOA/EDA and EDM before and...

Evidence-based management and EDM

I saw this article over on BI Review - Evidenced-Based Management - Business Wisdom, Part 2. A good article that summarizes some of the key principles from the book (which I reviewed here and highly recommend). A focus on evidence...

New White Paper on Smart-Enough Customer Decisions

Montgomery Research have just published this "thought-leadership" white paper "Smart-Enough Customer Decisions" written by yours-truly. In it I discuss how smart-enough customer decisions can improve results for all concerned. This is based on the material in Smart (Enough) Systems. Technorati...

And the lucky winners are.....

As promised we gave away five copies of Smart (Enough) Systems at the European Business Rules Conference and the lucky winners were Olli Rauhala, Senior Architect, Cap Gemini Finland Oy Marcel Keurntjes, Service Process and Application Consultant, Oce-Technologies B.V Gerard...

EDM-Enabled Web Self Service Better be Top of Mind for Financial Services Firms

On June 25 (2007), I saw this news posting on DM Review’s website – “IBM and KANA Study Shows Untapped Potential for US Financial Services Web Sites to Better Serve Clients,” and was intrigued to see to what extent Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) concepts were mentioned. It’s been a long time now that web-based customer service capabilities have been promoted as a timelier, lower cost method of maintaining and growing customer relationships than other options, but what is interesting is that the study, titled "Service Done Right: Why Great Online Customer Service Matters More than Ever," shows cultural and generational factors driving many financial institutions to take web based customer service much more seriously.

OMG standards

Just a quick note that I have posted my slides from the OMG meeting (presenting a submission for a Production Rules Representation) here. Technorati Tags: business rules, OMG, PRR

Meeting Customer Needs Online

I saw this article - U.S. Banks Not Meeting Customer Needs Online, According to Brulant Study - and it made me think about previous posts on the blog that might help some of these banks do exactly that - meet...

Bad Business (Rules)?

Thanks to my colleague and fellow guest blogger Ian Turvill, who recently passed me an article from Clickz.com titled “Reward Programs: Continuous Rewards and Business Rules” by Jack Aaronson. Mr. Aaronson raises some interesting points about a marketing tactic called continuous rewards, one of several reward schedule techniques marketers may use in their pursuit of improving customer loyalty.

EBRC Summary and update

I was at the European Business Rules Conference last week and blogged from the following sessions. I have added links to the slides for each if you were waiting for them. Live from EBRC - The New Rules of Business...

Business Rules Management Systems as Matchmaker?

Yesterday I noticed this headline on DM Review’s website, “IT and Business Managers Universally Out of Sync,” and was immediately reminded of how an Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) approach to business rules actually brings these two groups of people together to achieve a common objective.

Sequential rules, inferencing and misinformation at EBRC

Having just wrapped up the European Business Rules Conference (see my previous posts), I noticed that some misinformation was provided at EBRC around sequential and inferencing execution of business rules. Sadly the misinformation was provided by a vendor (who lacks...

Shameless Commerce: Calling the Sub-Continent

EDM software market is estimated to be about $ 20 billion worldwide and growing at 10-12 percent annually.

“Smart Enough”…Processes

The June 2007 issue of DM Review features an interview with business process management (BPM) vendor Metastorm CEO Bob Farrell, titled “Process Intelligence.” Given Metastorm’s focus on BPM it isn’t surprising that Mr. Farrell has a process centric view of the world. Rather surprisingly though, it seems their business is experiencing trends similar to those developing around Enterprise Decision Management (EDM).

Live from EBRC - Production Rule Standards

Last session today at the EBRC was my pal Christian (from ILOG) talking about production rules - Production Rule Representation (PRR - no link yet but the BMI Domain Task Force is here) and Rule Interchange Format (RIF). Christian began...

Live from EBRC - business rules in Complex Event Processing

After lunch at EBRC I attended Paul Vincent's session on Business Rules in Complex Event Processing. Paul discussed CEP as involving real-time events, using patterns from historical data, relating these events and patterns to refine the situation and then detecting...

Live from EBRC - mobile healthcare monitoring

Next up are my old friends from Kiwok - Rules to improve care processes and patient quality of life. The Kiwok solution being discussed is for heart monitoring. Previously, when a patient had heart problems, hospitals hooked up a device...

Live from EBRC - Business Rules Approach Applied

Next EBRC session is Business Rules Approach Applied with Alcedo Coenen, formerly of ING. He was talking about knowledge analysis and how it can contribute to process optimization. Within banks, and other organizations, there is much to be gained from...

Live from EBRC - Rule Management to Business Governance

Second day of blogging from EBRC today and first up is Ron Ross - From Rule Management to Business Governance. Ron started by giving me a hard time about blogging (hi Ron) and then asked why companies are not working...

What do people do with analytics?

Interesting little poll over on KD Nuggets today - readers were asked where they had applied data mining in the last 12 months. The top 5 were: CRM (26.1% of respondents) Banking (23.9%) Direct Marketing/ Fundraising (20.3%) Science (18.8%) Fraud...

Live from EBRC - My presentation

Here is my presentation: Technorati Tags: analytic application, analytics, Blaze Advisor, BRMS, business rules, data mining, decision service, EBRC, EDM, enterprise decision management, Model Builder, predictive analytics, Smart (Enough) Systems, smartenoughsystems

Live from EBRC - Agility and Compliance

Last session at EBRC before today's high point (that would be my session), is Agility and Compliance require a combination of BPM/SOA, EDA and BRA by Jan Vanthienen, Leo Hermans and Wilfreid Lemahieu. They were missing Leo but got started...

Live from EBRC - AML Business Rules

Blogging live again from EBRC - this session is on AML Business Rules at PostFinance (part of Swiss Post) by Oliver K. Burnand who heads up compliance for PostFinance, the FSI within Swiss Post. Provides transaction processing as a public...

Live from EBRC - Applying business rules to gain competitive advantage

Blogging live from EBRC again - Applying Business Rules to Gain Competitive Advantage. A multi-channel retail case study by Qusai Sarraf, CEO of IVIS Group. Presentation is about Tesco. Qusai emphasized that competitive advantage is all about agility today -...

Live from EBRC - Developments in Business Rule Standards

I am blogging from EBRC and next up is John Hall of Model Systems talking about business rules standards (slides should appear on the site at some point).. John emphasized the need for business rules and business process to be...

Live from EBRC - The New Rules of Business

I am attending the European Business Rules Conference (EBRC) and blogging live from some sessions. First up is Prof. Benjamin Grosof of MIT on the Semantic Web. Benjamin asked why are rules standards happening now when this kind of system...

Book Review: Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense

On the plane over I finished Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert Sutton. This excellent book lays out why and how companies fail to drive their business based on evidence,...

Travelling in Europe

I am traveling in Europe this week so my posts may be intermittent. Barb/Ian/Gib may blog and I will try to blog from the events I am attending - the European Business Rules Conference and an OMG meeting. If you...

Using decisioning to build the healthcare payment of the future

I saw this report from McKinsey - Overhauling the US health care payment system (subscription required). Their summary has three key points: The hugely inefficient US health care payment system is ripe for transformation. The inefficiency is concentrated in the...

Picking an EDM pilot

When I was reading Scott Ambler's book, The Enterprise Unified Process, he had some great tips for picking a pilot project that I thought I would shamelessly steal and adapt for a discussion of pilot projects for enterprise decision management...

SOA, BPM (and EDM) for Enterprise Applications

Bill Swanton and Ian Finley at AMR Research recently published "SOA and BPM for Enterprise Applications: A Dose of Reality" (subscription required). This paper considered the value of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and how it is to be found in business...

Re-engineering the business through business rules - a guest opinion

Special guest opinion by Art Moore, based on his contribution to the recent book, The Business Rules Revolution: In many industries there has never been a greater need to rethink and retool processes to remain competitive in the globalized market....

Rules and requirements

Just a quick note. I spotted this nice summary article by Ron Ross over on the Requirements network - Business Rules Come First - and then also noticed that Larry Goldberg had asked an interesting question here - are business...

Another opinion on Embedded Analytics

(Posted by Guest Blogger, Gib Bassett) This morning on DMReview.com, there appeared under Industry News an article titled “InforSense Expands to Meet Customer Demand for Embedded Enterprise Analytics”, which sounded interesting given that Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) includes the concept...

Using EDM to respond to trends in Financial Services

Guillermo Kopp over at Tower Group wrote this piece - Top 10 Trends in Financial Services: New Approaches in a Changing World (subscription required). It is an interesting paper, though I hope he will write some follow-up pieces as there...

New technology but so what?

I saw this article today - Pay by Voice over on the MIT review and it made me think about many new technologies I hear of. Voice recognition, RFID, biometric identification, gesture operating systems, integrated GPS or whatever are all...

Welcome Gib Bassett as a guest author

Another author joins the team this week. Gib Bassett, a colleague here at Fair Isaac, is joining us. His first post is based on some personal experience and we look forward to regular and interesting posts. Welcome.

Job Security: Application Developers Should Take a Cue from BI Professionals

(Posted by Guest Blogger, Gib Bassett) I recently had one of the worst car service experiences of my career, where upon returning from our InterAct conference on a four hour flight my driver waited almost an hour for another fare...

Being customer-centric means being decision-centric

Nice post over on the Forrester Marketing blog today - Being Customer-Centric Is Hard. But, C'mon, It's Not THAT Hard! in which Elena makes some good points. However: Rather than saying "enough with the automated systems already", why not make...

Customer service, websites and decision automation

I got a great example today of the value of automating decisions in a flexible way. A major retailer, that I know to be a user of business rules, had finally got some Nintendo Wiis in stock. Like many of...

Decision-centric business improvement

My buddies over at Big Sky Thinking had a great post today - Why Optimizing Decisions is the Most Important Thing You Can Do, Part II. They lay out a great, if simple, process for focusing in on the decisions...

Shameless commerce: Smart (Enough) Systems

As some of you know by now I have been working, with Neil Raden, on a new book. As the files shipped to the printers yesterday, I thought I would take the opportunity to shamelessly plug the book here on...

EDM and Customer Centricity

Suresh Vittal over at Forrester wrote a nice little piece this week - "Eight Marketing Technologies That Enable Customer Centricity" (subscription or purchase required). He does a nice job of discussing some of the challenges and identifying technology both for...

Cathedrals, Bazaars, Crowds, Ignorance and Predictive Analytics

A friend (thanks Ann) sent me a link to this Nicholas Carr article "The Ignorance of Crowds" in which he discussed Eric Raymond's seminal paper on open source called "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". For those of you who don't...

Analytics for the Repo Man

(Posted by Guest Blogger, and someone who's never yet spoken with someone from a collections agency - at least not as a "client" - Ian Turvill.) We all know that analytics are used extensively in financial services, and particularly in...

Production Rule Representation at OMG - a sneak peak

I saw Mark Proctor post on the W3C Rule Interchange Format (RIF) over the weekend - W3C Rule Interchange Format for Production Rule Systems. As regular readers know, I chair the Production Rule Representation standard group for the OMG. As...

The all-new Business Rules Forum!

For those of you who have attended the Business Rules Forum in the past should know that this year's event is going to be better than ever. If you have not attended, this is a great way to find out...

Metrics, metrics, metrics

Akash recently posted a comment and asked me a question - what metrics to consider to see how the use of business process management systems (BPMS) and business rules management systems (BRMS) can help the insurance industry compared to non-BPMS/BRMS....

Book Review: The Enterprise Unified Process

I have just read (skimmed, really) Scott Ambler's book The Enterprise Unified Process: Extending the Rational Unified Process . If you are using the Rational Unified Process (from IBM), or considering doing so, and worried about applying it to a...