| ||||
Blog: James TaylorApril 23, 2008Here's how to use EDM to support Earth DayWell today was Earth Day - you knew that, I hope. I knew because last week I was at John Muir’s house with a wonderful group of 4th/5th graders doing a simulation of his period. So, in the spirit of Earth Day, how are Enterprise Decision Management and Smart (enough) Systems “green”?
You get the picture. If you use Enterprise Decision Management to automate and improve decisions and so built smarter systems, you would have a cleaner conscience come Earth Day. Last note, if you visit John Muir’s house, say hi to Ranger Tad for me - he was great and the kids really learned a lot from him. Related Posts
April 22, 2008Analytics and the Oakland A's (not that kind of analytics)The Oakland Athletics Score with Mobile Coupons headlined an article about this new approach to delivering coupons. Reading this it seemed to me that this was an opportunity for the Oakland A’s, well known for their use of analytics in player selection, to bring analytics to bear on the marketing operations. Mobile coupons are constrained in space and time and so must be particularly well targeted. Analytics, both descriptive analytic/data mining and predictive analytics, are well established in the marketing field for targeting, segmentation and offer acceptance prediction. Combining these analytics with rules about specific individuals, what their opt-in status is, what their past buying behavior is and so on enables effective targeting decisions to be made. Perhaps more importantly it allows these decisions to be automated. Instead of the decision to send a particular offer to a group of customers, why not make a decision for each customer as to what offer to send them? Target them directly, personalize the offer, maximize the chance that it is relevant. Why offer a discount on a single game ticket to a season ticket holder, for instance, or a discount to a restaurant that’s the other side of the ballpark from their seats? Personalization of mobile coupons seems to me to be more important than the personalization of more traditional coupons. Let’s hope the A’s are as smart about this kind of analytics as they are about the other kind. Related Posts
New Expert Channel on B-Eye NetworkWell there’s now another place to find our materials - I have opened for business as an expert on the B-Eye Network. Check out my channel Competing on Decisions (thanks to Neil for suggesting the name). This blog will be syndicated there but I will also be writing articles, posting white papers and generally making content available. You can check out my first article, Competing on (Customer) Decisions today. There are two feeds you might like to add to your feed reader: Related Posts
Some thoughts on Adaptive Decision ManagementPaul Haley wrote an interesting piece last week on Adaptive Decision Management. This is a really good piece and I highly recommend it. I do have a couple of things to add, however. While Paul is correct that Fair Isaac did not talk about “decision management” until after the HNC merger, Fair Isaac had a long history prior to that in doing decision management - combining predictive analytic models and scores with business rules into what they called “strategies”. Post the HNC merger we simply formalized a name to describe what both companies had been doing. Fair Isaac/HNC Products like Falcon, TRIAD and Capstone are not what you might call traditional applications but neither are they tools. They are decision services (wiki) with software for case management, data integration and other related tasks wrapped around them. They plug into backbone applications (core banking systems, Loan Origination Systems) and provide those applications with the critical decisions they need. But, enough history. Like Paul I think that dashboards, while useful, are not enough (see this post, for instance) and I agree that that neither rules nor predictive analytics alone are enough for true decision management. That’s why decision management also has something we call adaptive control and optimization (wiki). Indeed the book has a whole chapter on it and Paul goes on to discuss it a little - it is often called Champion/Challenger testing or A/B testing. Today, this is largely a manual feedback loop. Automatically learning analytics are clearly the next step and were one of the future technologies we discussed briefly in the book. There are some challenges - decisions where the consequences take a long time to play out can be challenging and you don’t want models to adapt to changes you caused, for instance. Say you ran a SuperBowl ad and this generated a vast increase in page hits. Well you would hardly want your analytics to start adapting to it as though this were just a random increase. That said, for many problems you can not only automate the adaptive part you can even automate the champion/challenger testing and work to produce algorithms that generate challengers that will teach you something useful is well underway. One last comment, though. If you have not externalized and managed your decisions you will not be able to have them adapt effectively. As one of the founders of Fair Isaac famously said “if you want to improve a decision you have to grab it by the throat and not let go”. Related Posts
April 21, 2008First Look - InRule TechnologyA couple of weeks ago I got an update from the folks at InRule. InRule was founded in 2002 in Chicago and has 100+ customers. Their focus, like most business rules vendors, is on dynamic decisioning and process agility. They estimate that nearly half their prospective customers are also doing BPM not just rules. InRule is exclusively focused on .NET . While its customers initially cane from financial services and Insurance, their customers now span most industries. They are, as you would expect, an active Microsoft partner and a member of the Microsoft Business Process Alliance (one of several rules vendors). InRule has three products - the flagship one, InRule for BizTalk Server and InRule for Workflow Foundation. In each case they provide authoring, catalog (repository), SDK, and execution server components. Neither of the rules engines Microsoft has embedded in Biztalk and Workflow Foundation are designed for business users to maintain rules. Adding this capability and extending the base Microsoft platform are where InRule adds value. Their value proposition is a pretty standard business rules one, focused on quick time to value and the right tools for different users. Microsoft tends to be very focused on developers but InRule adds a focus on business users/analysts and process owners. They have made their product easily embeddable and have garnered lots of ISV interest. They also have some multi-platform customers who have bought another vendor’s Java offering but have chosen InRule over the established vendor’s .Net product. InRule is focused on decision points in business processes and on delivering dynamic decisioning at this point. For instance, in a Basel II process a company initially had scorecards in Excel, this was replaced by a web application but the business users liked the control they had with Excel and IT’s web application was too hard to change - they rapidly got a backlog - so they adopted rules. Other companies are moving to SOA and have multiple systems with redundant logic and use a decision service to get the shared logic. The flagship product has a catalog similar to SourceSafe/TeamServer, authoring and verification, an SDK and potential customer authoring. Rules can be stored in the catalog and pushed to the run time engine. Decision tables, constrained rule editing, value lists and easy to build custom applications are supported. The catalog has versioning, check-in/check-out, permissions, promotion, labeling etc InRule for BizTalk Server is built on the flagship product (includes all its capabilities) and includes a BizTalk adaptor and has static classes added to Biztalk to call the InRule engine. Biztalk’s rule engine has rete-based inferencing and a repository but lacks IF THEN ELSE logic, which makes authoring and maintaining complex logic very difficult, as nested IF statements must be used. The BizTalk rule engine has a very weak user interface for rule editing (Rules Composer). InRule for WindowsWorkflow Foundation uses the WF rule engine, adding authoring and management capabilities; the product uses their own editing controls and runs as win components. The rule engine in the Workflow Foundation is ruleset-based, compiled into code and handles sequential and some forward chaining. InRule provides verification tools and irDeveloper - a very thin version of their SDK as the Workflow Foundation rue engine only runs against object graphs- no database or XSD support. The catalog is the same as the main InRule product. InRule extends the Workflow Foundation rule engine to handle notifications, complex functions etc - typically those at the Excel/VBA intersection. There is no support for patterns or the XML/SQL stuff from the main engine. It should be noted that all InRule products can be called from WF workflows (or any BPM tool). Related Posts
A chance to win a camera by talking about rule base development!Valentin Zacharias is conducting an online survey on the development of rule bases and would really appreciate your opinion! The survey is very short and should only require a few minutes to complete. Any additional feedback or comments are also very welcome. If you answer all questions and enter your email address at the end of the survey, you have a chance to win a Canon SD1100 that will be given to one of the participants. To participate please go to: surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=sZ1_2fndMD1QnCLgWQfR_2bsBw_3d_3d The goal of the survey is to give an overview of the kind of methods and tools actually used for the development of rule-based systems (with a focus on verification and validation). It also tries to identify some of the challenges facing rule-base development. The results of the survey will be publicly available. Drop him a note or enter your email address at the end of the survey to have them sent to you. The results will also be accessible on the website vzach.de/blog/ and I will likely blog about them too. <Apologies for cross-posting to all 3 blogs>
April 18, 2008First Look - i-luminateNeil and I caught up with Joe Foley, Chief Architect and Kirsten Chapman, VP Global Marketing and Alliances from i-lluminate this week. illuminate (www.i-lluminate.com) is a Spanish company that has recently begun to expand in the US. illuminate is trying to tackle what it sees as the unsolved performance problem of ad-hoc analysis in companies who have made investments in data warehousing and business intelligence. Despite the dramatic price/performance improvements, the illuminate folks think that the limitations of SQL and fixed data structures can cause complex queries to become large IT projects or even complete nightmares. In particular the fact that traditional data analytic infrastructure develops layers of de-normalized data, star schemas and massive parallelism to meet performance needs means that flexibility is lost. illuminate’s approach is to store everything as values and to store each value only once. This means that all relationships are kept, not just those designed in, and that the database schema is built on the fly as actual data is loaded. While this takes longer that loading a traditional RDBMS, it is comparable to the time it takes to load and index a database while making the generation of extended metadata and incremental addition of new data sources very easy. One consequence of this is that after about 20-50Gb of data loaded the illuminate value pool tends to stabilize at around 6Gb. Adding more data does not increase the size of the value pool. While disk space is cheap, this approach makes it much easier to keep all the critical information in memory. illuminate likes to talk about the time to understand - the time from the definition of a problem to the understanding of an answer. This time is improved, they say, both by matching the load and index time of a traditional database and by improving dramatically the time to get results, especially results from ad-hoc analysis. The value-based approach also allows any kind of query to be developed and supports navigation by value (regardless of logical tables). Because Illuminate stores values (”London”,” Manager”, etc.) instead of values in records, it is able to provide some interesting discovery capabilities through associative queries. For example, find everything that is associated with the date December 7, 1952. Relationships that weren’t understood before can be mined. A relational database would need to scan every table to get this information. Another associative query could start with a product and find everything that is related to it. The iLuminate product range includes iCorrelate, a tool for ad-hoc querying that takes advantage of their approach, as well as iAnalyze, a simple dashboard tool (OEM’d from QlikTech). Support for ODBC/JDBC means that analytics tools from SAS to SPSS and Cognos to Business Objects can also use the database. They made their point with a couple of nice case studies and then talked about their North American FREE product introduction Proof of Concept program. This is designed to prove that their database can do what nothing else can and do it fast. Companies interested in this program can define a high-value information need that users can’t get-or that takes too long to get-that uses up to 25GB of raw data from up to 6 data sources. No schemas are required, just data and there is no charge with full evaluation team participation. You can check out the program at i-lluminate.com/pilot_request.asp or the company at i-lluminate.com.
April 17, 2008Two Great Decision Management Conferences this year First up is InterACT, Fair Isaac’s show on decision management and analytics, April 27-30. I will be blogging this event live. Even if you aren’t a Fair Isaac client you should check out this show. It’s at the Palace Hotel in lovely San Francisco and is an opportunity to hear Ian Ayres, author of Super Crunchers and attend one of the best analytic symposiums to hear about some leading edge analytic techniques and approaches. There are lots of sessions for Financial Services companies on how to cope with the current banking crisis - sessions on managing highly indebted consumers, risk management, helping the unbanked, the mortgage crisis, better collections strategy and for Insurance companies who can find a whole track on claims, underwriting, customer service and marketing in the new world of insurance.
John Rymer of Forrester, one of my favorite analysts, is speaking on dynamic business applications, a really interesting area and there are a number of sessions on detecting, managing and controlling fraud from internal and external threats. The growing array of regulations - Basel II and others - are covered so you can grow through your response to regulation not collapse under its weight and scoring, of course, will get a thorough working over so you won’t be confused about the benefits and limitations of scoring. I will be there blogging and I want to meet you so I am offering a discount for readers - just enter the discount code SFJT when you register and get the unlimited registration for just $1,345. This is a great deal! You can register here and get more information on the event here. I highly recommend the show and I hope to see you there.
April 16, 20082008 BPM & Workflow Handbook - 30% Discount
ISBN: 978-0-9777527-6-8, Quality hardcover. 320 pages. List Price: $95.00
Related Posts
April 15, 2008First Look - InfoCentricity XenoI recently got an overview of InfoCentricity and their analytic product, Xeno. InfoCentricity is an analytic solutions company focused on helping customers find the insights buried in their data. They see a gap between BI-like analytic tools and data mining/analytic tools like SAS or S where you need to be a programmer. Their objective is to provide ease of use (so that programming is not required) but to also deliver analytic power for analysts. The company was founded in 2000 and has a strong historical tie with the retail banking industry and to credit scoring. They offer Xeno and analytic services that are mostly in support of Xeno but they also provide analytic services such as developing custom models. Xeno is their analytic workbench. It’s a nice product with a thin-client metaphor. There is no software install/maintenance as it is completely web-based and it is designed to build better models, faster by supporting rapid iteration. It is data agnostic and designed to support a collaborative, team-based modeling process. It supports the usual predictive modeling techniques, some unique ones like “multiple outcome optimization”, trees, clustering and reporting/analysis. It is aimed at modelers but they do have some non-modelers using it and they are working on extending it to develop an easy to use tool for non modelers e.g. in retail/catalog. As they add this they plan to continue the collaboration focus so that Xeno supports not just collaboration between modelers but also collaboration between models and non-modelers. The tool is not focused on data preparation – most of their customers use SAS for this I suspect – but is aimed squarely at a collaborative modeling environment. The product has a nice, web based interface. It provides quick analysis of imported data and a wide array of reports. The interface is very much a point-and-click one with lots of automation including automated classing and binning and predictive ranking. The idea of the automation is to get you most of the way while supporting manual fine tuning. The tool stores versions, shows the steps in the process and manages the development and evolution of models nicely. They have a tree builder and a clustering tool and these tools provide guidance to make sure clusters, for instance, are moving in the right direction. While aimed at modelers, the tool was approachable and open without any of the opaque modeling scripting one sometimes sees. From a company perspective they think their differentiators are analytic brain power, a commitment to knowledge transfer, innovation, collaboration, data flexibility and ease of use. Their focus areas are risk management (credit, collections) and marketing (response, revenue, churn, segmentation). Related Posts
April 14, 2008(Not) Live from IMPACT - a blogger wrapAs I could not attend all of IMPACT 2008 and as there were hundreds of sessions, I thought I would post as complete a set of posts as I could (with help from Dan Zrobok), starting with mine:
Related Posts
April 11, 2008After EDM - the future of businessThe second part of my response to Dave Wright’s comment is about the kind of business one can run after one adopts EDM. To do this, let’s predicate the discussion a company that has adopted Enterprise Decision Management as a core management principle, implemented the technology and development approaches that support it and had long enough doing this to have updated and modernized its application portfolio. Let’s also assume that they have adopted business process management approaches and technologies and a service-oriented architecture to underpin it all (BPM/SOA). How might this look from a business perspective? What might be the characteristics of such an outfit?
What else could this kind of company do? The sky’s the limit I guess but I would love your thoughts. Next week I will blog a summary of the bloggers who attended IBM’s IMPACT show and talk some more about agility. Related Posts
Read some of the best blog posts on Intelligent EnterpriseNeil’s two blog posts on BI and technology rated highly again - the second one getting more traffic from Intelligent Enterprise readers than any other posts. Check them out: Related Posts
April 10, 2008Howard Dresner recommends the bookHoward Dresner, now independent but previously of Gartner and Hyperion and one of the leading voices in the Business Intelligence and Performance Management space listed Some good sources and included our book and our blogs (this one and Neil’s on Intelligent Enterprise). Thanks Howard. Related Posts
After EDM - some thoughts on technologySome time ago a regular reader, Dave Wright, left a comment on a blog post I wrote as a guest. In it he asked “What comes after EDM?”. This, of course, is both an interesting and a difficult question. Thinking about it I decided to split it into two parts - one about technologies that I see coming “after” the current set of technologies used in EDM and one about the kind of business one can run after one adopts EDM. The second one I will post tomorrow and I would love comments on either so let your creativity flow. Today EDM relies on a number of key technologies:
Adaptive control is missing from the list simply because it is a technique rather than a technology. Several changes in this technology list can be expected:
I am sue there are others but these were the ones that came to mind. Let me know what you think. Tomorrow, how will adopting EDM change businesses. | ||||
