Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Great event, nice little discount.
There is a great conference coming up October 26-30 - not only are Neil and I Co-Chairs but readers of the blog can get a discount. We are presenting twice - A Pre-Conference Tutorial Succeeding as a Decision-Centric Organization and a Keynote Competing on Decisions. Because of this you can get a special $100 Conference Discount courtesy of Smart (enough) Systems LLC if you use code “GVDJT” when you register
See details below
| “I have concluded that decision making and the techniques and technologies to support and automate it will be the next competitive battleground for organizations. Those who are using business rules, data mining, analytics and optimization today are the shock troops of this next wave of business innovation” |
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Tom Davenport,
Author of Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning |
| Hear a special video keynote and roundtable discussion with Tom Davenport exclusively at this year’s Forum. |
About the Business Rules Forum & 1st EDM Summit
Have a look at this year’s program. Find out what the excitement is all about!
Here are the details of our Pre-Conference Tutorial …
Succeeding as a Decision-Centric Organization
When: Sunday, October 26, 2008
Topic: The principles of Enterprise Decision Management, its application to critical business processes and decisions and the appropriate use of available technology.
Highlights:
- How to identify and prioritize the operational decisions that drive your organization’s success
- How to use business rules as a foundation to automate these decisions for maximum agility
- How to improve these decisions using data mining and predictive analytics
- How to ensure continuous improvement and competitive advantage using adaptive control
And our Keynote …
Competing on Decisions
When: Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Topic: Neil Raden and James Taylor introduce a new competitive concept – Competing on Decisions. Thanks are due to Tom Davenport for raising the awareness of the need for analytics in his book, “Competing on Analytics.” Seeking out the increasingly small margins required by competitive business pressures has brought analytics into vogue, typically requiring vast amounts of digestible data .Getting their arms around this deluge of new and existing information, organizations realize that they can gain analytic insights customers, products, channels, partners and much more. But some companies are already finding that analytics is only a part of the process – the intelligent application of the findings of these new insights can only pay off if the decisions that are made are correct. By becoming decision-centric, by using business rules to control those decisions and by leveraging their data to make the best decisions companies are increasingly competing on decisions.
Highlights:
- What is a decision in a business context?
- Why decisions matter
- Why decisions are different
- How business rules control decisions
Other Keynotes at this Year’s Events include Tom Davenport, author of the bestselling book Competing on Analytics and Professor at Babson College, will deliver an exclusive video keynote on “Decision Making, Decision Management and Technology.” and Ron Ross, author of numerous definitive books on business rules, will deliver the opening keynote “From Here to Agility”.
Besides these great keynotes, this year’s program is truly outstanding with 60+ rich, in-depth sessions to help you bring real agility to your organization.
The 2008 Program Schedule offers world-class sessions on business rules, enterprise decisioning and related technologies. Check out the schedule, speakers and abstracts!
To Register and Receive Your Discount
When you register, be sure to include the promotional code - GVDJT - getting you $100 off registration.
See you there…
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Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at The role of decision management in creating (and maintaining) a common vision.
An interesting article on the role of the business analyst in creating a common vision caught my eye this morning. The article focused on creating a common vision but it made me think about maintaining and developing that common vision over time, particularly of the complex logic in a system. Procedural code does not lend itself to business user understanding and I am not convinced there is that much a business analyst can do to help. If, however, the complex logic is externalized as a decision and that decision is managed declaratively (using business rules, say) then the business analyst (and the business user) have a viable point of communication with the programmers. Whether the non-technical users maintain the rules directly or collaborate with programmers to make the changes they need, the separation of business logic from “plumbing” code and the use of a declarative, higher-level syntax mean they will be much more likely to maintain a common vision of the system’s behavior. As I have said before, we could call this application development 2.0.
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Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Analytics simplify data to amplify its value.
Analytics simplify data to amplify its value
This was a phrase I remember from my friends in the Fair Isaac R&D team. I have no idea if this is original or a well-known analytic quote but I like it. Think about it, most business users would say they want usable, actionable information not just data so analytics “amplifies value” by replacing large amounts of data with a statement encapsulating what that data implies. After all, better data adds no value to a company only better decisions thanks to better data do.
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Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Shameless Commerce - Coming to Europe.
I am going to be in Europe in October and I am looking to productively fill a couple of days in my schedule. I am available Friday the 3rd, Monday the 6th and possibly Wednesday the 8th. If you are based in the London - Paris - Brussels - Munich - Frankfurt area and are interested in a day’s consulting, drop me an email james@smartenoughsystems.com.
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Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at A reader asks - what makes a company ready (for EDM)?.
A reader had an interesting question this week. As a comment to Using decision management to deliver intelligent business performance he asked “What makes a company ready?”. I suspect my closing line “The products are, mostly, ready. Whether companies are is another question…” prompted this.
So, what makes a company ready for enterprise decision management - for taking control of its decisions, externalizing them, managing them and improving them? Well we went into this at some length in the Readiness Assessment chapter of Smart (Enough) Systems but I think there are five main things:
- How good is your business and IT collaboration and alignment?
Decision Services and decision management need the business and IT to work together to define and manage the decision logic. While technology can help, you need the organizational reality to match. In practice this is very varied in most companies so look for opportunities in areas where there is either a good working relationship or at least a willingness to try.
- How available and clean is your data?
Having good data and information management makes EDM a lot easier. It’s not an absolute requirement - some EDM projects are rules-heavy and analytics-light - but it sure helps. If this is a problem in your organization, take a decision-centric view of the data you need (what helps me make THIS decision) and try and just clean up that portion. Don’t boil the ocean.
- How much analytic understanding and skill is there?
Developing analytic models, doing data mining, leveraging the insight that can be gained from your data takes skills you may not have. If you don’t, consider outsourcing it (there are plenty of small analytic shops out there who can build models for you) and start with simple to use models like regression, decision trees and score cards. Don’t forget that just using analysis tools to examine historical data can be a big help when writing rules, for instance. You don’t have to start at a super-high level of sophistication.
- How good are you at handling organizational change?
Automating operational decisions will almost certainly cause some organizational change. If changing responsibilities and KPIs is a really difficult tasks at your organization, adopting EDM could be hard. Again, you can start local with an executive with lots of pain or some mental flexibility - just enough to make one decision-worth’s work.
- Finally, do your managers and executives have an operational focus?
EDM is about improving operational systems and processes by improving the decisions within them. If you managers and executives don’t care about day-to-day stuff, don’t track operations closely then you will be challenged when applying EDM. Find someone who knows how their business ticks and you will do better.
I hope this helps. If you want a little more details, here are five posts I wrote on this topic on my ebizQ blog:
If you like those posts, why not subscribe to that blog also?
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Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at links for 2008-08-27.
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Post about Oracle sales prospector on which I commented, wondering if this only worked fro manual review or if the insight could be injected into transactional decision making also.
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Great debate between Peter Lin nd the folks at Tibco on BRE v CEP!
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Nice article on why rules
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Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Next generation direct marketing with decision management.
Elana Anderson had a great post on direct marketing while I was on vacation -Next Generation Campaign Management.
She starts off with three great principles:
- Listen to all information provided by customers and prospects — both explicit and implied.
- Understand past and present information to determine the best possible marketing action.
- Communicate in a compelling, timely, and relevant manner.
All of these make perfect sense to me and show some of the weaknesses in less well thought out approaches I see out there. For instance:
- I see too many people separating web behavior from offline or back-office behavior (failing therefore to consider all the information available).
- I also see too many organizations either only allowing explicit preferences or deriving implicit ones - far too few effectively manage both.
- I see a lot of understanding going on but not enough projection into the future to see what will be the best thing to do next
- Too much focus on batch cycles and not enough on interactivity and real-time.
She goes on to articulate four key criteria for next generation campaign management systems:
- Are customer-aware.
- Provide centralized decision making.
- Enable cross-channel execution.
- Integrate marketing operations.
I would revise the second one a little as I am not convinced that it is enough for a campaign management system to provide centralized (campaign) decision making. I think your campaign management system needs to be integrated with centralized (business) decision making. For instance, customer support may share decisions with marketing; Pricing decisions are relevant to campaigns but not part of campaign management; Shipping and logistics decisions may constrain marketing options and so on. Customer-centric decision management makes campaign management way more effective for sure, I just think it should be a peer of campaign management not a part of it.
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Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Neil Speaking at Brainstorm San Francisco.
Neil has a new speaking gig - he is going to be speaking at Brainstorm San Francisco on “Applying Decision Management to Make Process Simpler, Smarter and More Agile”, October 1st in the morning. You can find the agenda here and register here.
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Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at SOA Survey for you.
A student of Information Systems for Business Performance at University College Cork, Ireland is investigating how SOA can influence the IT capability of a firm and to what extent this strategy can become a major initiative for changing the underlying business approach of an organization. I offered to post the survey which should take no longer than 5-10 minutes to complete:
Part 1: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=fmiRVCG0gBSazAo2TD5y1w_3d_3d
Part 2:http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=nhGoidn75v816XG39Tdkpg_3d_3d
I will get and post the results when they are done.
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Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Here’s why decision management matters to mobile marketing.
Ginger Conlon had a little piece on mobile marketing that caught my eye. This post highlighted the growing importance of mobile devices as both a customer support channel and as a marketing vehicle. I completely agree with this assessment but I think it means that, for both customer service and marketing, we will have to change our thinking. Mobile devices are never going to allow the interaction quality of larger ones (though constant improvement means that we will have mobile devices better than todays desktops by then the desktops will also be better). As a result we must be more proactive when dealing with those users. In support this means we must serve up actions not just information to those devices. In marketing it means we must make a more complex decision so we can deliver a more tightly focused, timely and location-aware offer. Decision management - focusing on and then automating and improving these decisions - will be critical to taking maximum advantage of these devices. It won’t be enough to take what you do now and simply make it display on a mobile device, you will have to do more.
This was written in advance and scheduled for posting while I am on vacation.
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