Enterprise Decision Management - a Weblog

Rewards? Experience? Loyalty? EDM!

Posed by guest blogger, James Taylor) I saw a couple of interesting posts when I returned from IBM's IMPACT show this week (blog posts here) -Jim Berkowitz on Want Customer Loyalty? Improve Customer Experience First and Ginger Conlon on Making...

Right here, right now with EDM

(Posed by guest blogger, James Taylor) Richard Higginbotham wrote a nice little post over on mycustomer.com called "Right here, right now: Event-triggered marketing". The use of enterprise decision management or EDM to deliver on this kind of customer-centric, event-based marketing...

Here's how Enteprise Decision Management puts location awareness to work

(Posted by guest blogger, James Taylor) I saw this post by Charlie Bess of EDS today - Location awareness -- the tip of the iceberg. Charlie makes the great point that knowing where something or someone is (location awareness) is...

Using EDM to make your ATMs into a sales channel

(Posted by guest blogger, James Taylor) My friends over at the Analytical Engine had an interesting post this week - ATM Machines As A Sales Channel. Their focus was on pre-approved offers and the possibility of loading them onto the...

Customer Interaction Management needs EDM

(Posted by guest blogger, James Taylor) It seems to be customer interaction week (month) on my blogs. Today I finished reading an article that prompted this post - Service-Oriented Customer Interaction Management by Ashutosh Roy of eGain. There was a...

Using EDM to deliver event-based marketing

(Posted by guest blogger, James Taylor) Adam Sarner at Gartner published Five Steps to Successful Event-Triggered Marketing last week. The abstract of this paper says: Successful event-triggered marketing is a process of identification, categorization, monitoring, optimizing and executing. Marketers that...

Progressive Financial Services Firms Demonstrate the Value of Predictive Analytics; Decision Services Offer a Path for Others to Follow

Yesterday an article I wrote about Decision Services appeared in the online edition of DM Review’s December 2007 issue ("Decision Services: Pragmatic Real-Time Analytics"). In it, I describe how Decision Services, by providing a framework for managing both business rules and analytics, can pave the way toward adopting predictive analytics.

It’s OK to “ignore the man behind the (predictive analytics) curtain” with EDM

The title of this post includes a quote from the film, “The Wizard of Oz,” when Dorothy’s dog Toto draws back a curtain revealing the “real” wizard (a man) pulling levers and pushing buttons to illuminate a frightening hologram of a smoky and not too nice false wizard. The jig is up, and the wizard is exposed for what he is, just a man. If only the same could be said of the experts driving data mining and predictive analytic software in today’s leading companies.

What's old is new - personalization is back

(Posted by guest blogger, James Taylor) One of the most common reasons for discussing enterprise decision management, and one of the most common ways in which people want to make their systems smarter, is in personalizing them. Making a system...

The Three Dimensions of Intelligent Business Processes

Today I read a September 21 Gartner Research note by Gareth Herschel titled, “The Role of Analytics in Adding Value to Business Processes.” As someone expert in analytics more so than Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Rules Management (BRMS), Gareth raises some important points to remember when discussing the role of analytics in business processes.

Using EDM to make call centers work better

I saw this interesting report in the McKinsey Quarterly - Anticipating customer queries in call centers. The article is free if your register and the summary says: A telecommunications company trying to optimize the economics of its call centers hesitated...

Is your system smart enough to make your customers feel good?

I saw a nice little post today, Why You Need to Reaffirm Customer Decisions, that made me think about automated systems. Does the system that takes orders from your customers "reassure, comfort, and instill confidence in the customer that their...

Customer focus with EDM

John Hagel, author of The Only Sustainable Edge (reviewed here), has a nice post on Tests for Customer Focused Companies. I liked his three "big" questions and any organization thinking about using a customer focus as a strategic weapon should...

Growing your business with decision management

A marketing focus today. More particularly a focus on marketing to existing customers prompted by three distinct posts. Firstly there was Growing Business the Old-Fashioned Way over on Customers Rock discussing how concentrating on existing customers can be very profitable....

Using EDM to improve marketing operations

I have been thinking about Marketing Operations (nicely described by Gary Katz here) and I saw a post on Why is marketing operations so important? on Unica's blog. It contained the great phrase: "What are the reasons for the growing...

Use Cases and Requirements - a response

Scott Sehlhorst, with whom I am presenting at Business Rules Forum this year, just posted Use Case Example With Business Rules. In the post Scott identifies 4 opportunities, in an ATM withdrawal use case, to find decisions and I thought...

Data Mining, Predictive Analytics and Markets of 1

Two articles made me think about the application of enterprise decision management, EDM, in the world of customer experience. First, I saw the one Jeff Kaplan wrote - "Data Mining as a Service: The Prediction is Not in the Box"....

Using EDM to meet CRM challenges and use what you know about your customers

Two articles in CIO magazine caught my eye this week. Firstly, Meridith Levinson wrote Getting to Know Them, an article about some award-winning systems. This was a great article and a couple of things occurred to me as I read...

Treating customers right, even if it means firing them

I saw this post by Seth Godin today - Treating different customers differently - and noticed that the Analytical Engine had a post on the same topic - Firing Customers - and it made me think about treating customers "right"...

Yahoo's senior marketer tells you to use EDM (kinda)

I was reading this interesting McKinsey report - Confronting proliferation ... in online media: An interview with Yahoo!’s senior marketer. In this report Cammie Dunaway, CMO for Yahoo, talks about how Yahoo is coping with the explosion of choices and...

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.

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.

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 - 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 -...

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...

Not just cross-channel, customer-centric

I saw this interesting Q&A today over on Intelligent Enterprise - Crossing Channels: Q&A With Best Buy's Matt Smith. The Q&A covered how Best Buy is moving into cross-channel analysis and how it hopes to use this as the basis...

Wells Fargo's Home Page Uses EDM

(Posted by Guest Blogger, and Amateur Webmaster, Ian Turvill.) James recently posted on the value of applying predictive analytics and the broader Enterprise Decision Management concept to the design of corporate home pages. As prescient as ever, James entry was...

EDM, connected decisions and life-cycle marketing

Lisa Bradner of Forrester (who is part of Forrester's marketing blog team) wrote Realizing The Life-Cycle Marketing Vision back in March but Ian pointed it out to me last week. The summary of the document says: "In simple terms, life-cycle...

A home page is a decision

I saw this post by Seth Godin - Blow up your home page - and it made me want to point out that when a customer or prospect visits the "home page" of your site, it feels to them like...

Live from InterACT: What's Next? The "Best Next Action"

I am attending InterACT San Francisco 2007 this week and blogging live (or nearly live) from the sessions. This session is "What's Next? The "Best Next Action"" with Jeff Zabin, one of our precision marketing "gurus" and author of Precision...

Live from InterACT: Dial It Up! Workshop: Organic Growth

I am attending InterACT San Francisco 2007 this week and blogging live (or nearly live) from the sessions. This session is "Dial It Up! Workshop: Organic Growth" in the Retail track. Jeff and Mark presented on how the Dial It...

From data to decision: Transforming Marketing Data to Enable Decision Management

My colleague Kevin Haas gave this presentation at the Unica Marketing Innovation Summit recently. The session was called "Data to Decision: Transforming Marketing Data to Enable Decision Management" and described as follows: Leading organizations are focusing on managing the decisions...

Using EDM in the loyalty economy

John Gaffney over on 1:1 wrote this nice piece on CPG Loyalty rules a little while ago and it reminded me of previous posts on using EDM to create the corner store feel of days gone by. I also think...

Congratulations to EDM-Driven MyCokeRewards

(Posted by Guest Blogger, and Six Cans A Day Man, Ian Turvill.) Congratulations to Coca-Cola's myCokeRewards.com which was given the PROMO's 2007 Interactive Marketing Award for "Best Loyalty Marketing". MyCokeRewards.com has been described on this blog before, though at the...

Personalization (again)

Over the last couple of days I have been pointed towards a couple of items that made me think some more about personalization and the fit of enterprise decision management, EDM, with the kind of targeting and focusing that personalization...

Predictive Modeling

Ozgur Dogan wrote a nice, if short, article on Advanced Predictive Modeling Made Simple (Sort of) for Chief Marketer that came my way today. He makes three good, clear points in the article: Segment your customers Absolutely, Good segmentation can...

What you need to know about Decision Services

A key tenet of Enterprise Decision Management is the automation of the operational decisions that drive your business. You need to identify operational decisions and automate them; you also need to separate them out from the rest of your applications...

Why Banks need to focus on "Growth Decisions"

I was meeting with an IDC Financial Insights analyst today, Rachel Hunt, and in the conversation she used the phrase "growth decisions". I really liked this as it seems to me that increasingly banks, and many other organizations, are going...

"Blogging Live" from InterACT Lisbon: "How EDM Really Works"

"How EDM Really Works" at InterACT introduces the concepts of decision automation and predictive analytics.

How to get Macro AND Micro control with decisioning

When I posted Think Micro not Macro it prompted several comments that made me want to post some more. Ron Shevlin at the Marketing ROI Blog who had the original post responding to the predictive analytic predictions that started all...

Think Micro not Macro - decisions, that is

I saw this post on Diamond Analytics' blog - Micro to Macro - where they discussed this post. There's a key quote: For analytics to become the lifeblood of the (marketing) accountability process, the focus needs to shift from a...

Book Review: Data Mining Techniques

I am getting caught up on book reviews over the break. Today's is Data Mining Techniques by Berry and Linoff. This is one of the classic works on data mining and well worth the read.I really liked the book both...

Marketing to (and with) algorithms with EDM

Ian, my fellow blogger here at edmblog.com, pointed me to this article You Must Market To Algorithms, Not Just People. The article nicely summarized the growing role of algorithms in marketing and, as predictive analytics and even rules can be...