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Blog: James Taylor« June 2008 | Main | August 2008 » July 31, 2008InfoWorld Review of ILOG Rules for .NETCopyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at InfoWorld Review of ILOG Rules for .NET.My friend Steve has been using the ILOG Rules for .NET product (which you can now download for an extended trial as I discussed here) and has written a nice little review of it - Lab test: ILOG Rules for .Net meshes well with Microsoft. There’s a lot to like in the .Net version of ILOG’s product and I, like many others, am waiting to hear what IBM’s plans for it will be when it finishes acquiring ILOG.
Article on operational decisionsCopyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Article on operational decisions.Our article on The Nature of Operational Decisions was just published - enjoy!
Application Development 2.0Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Application Development 2.0.Ann All had a post on Agile development brings IT, business together that had the great phrase “application development 2.0″. In the article she mentioned some very worthy objectives for this 2.0 version of application development. Here they are, paraphrased slightly.
I will come back to the bit about “Use dynamic scripting languages like Ruby, Python and Perl” in a moment. Back to the list. I am struck by the inherent contradiction between this list and traditional development technologies - code, to be blunt. How can we expect close collaboration between developers and end users if the developers are using a language (Java, C#, Perl) that the end users cannot read? How can users do quality assurance on code they can’t read? Perhaps users can be the drivers for new features, but wouldn’t it be better if they could actually so something about the features they want? How frequent can releases be if the code must go through the usual QA/test/deploy sequence? The answer, I think, lies in “Don’t use traditional programming languages” though it is not “Use dynamic scripting languages like Ruby, Python and Perl”. As I noted before, this very focus on programming and programmers is a barrier to progress and replacing one procedural language with another won’t help because, as Ira Fuchs put it:
Instead of continuing to use procedural gobbledegook that no user is going to understand, it is time to move the business logic that drives our systems in to something more useful - business rules. Looking at Ann’s list in this context we see a different perspective:
So, a business rules approach should be part of Application Development 2.0. Stop writing code, start specifying business rules. Lastly Ann correctly highlights Agile techniques as a component in Application Development 2.0 and this is entirely compatible with the use of business rules. Indeed, I wrote an article for InfoQ on this topic - rules and agile - some time ago but it is still worth a read. It is also interesting to consider the point at which Application Development 2.0 might not really be application development any more.
July 30, 2008Decision Management Jobs - New Category, First PostCopyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Decision Management Jobs - New Category, First Post.Occasionally people ask me if I know someone who might be interested in a particular job so I have decided, for now, to post such requests on the blog so you can all see them. If I get too many then I will come up with something else. Here’s the first: Marketelligent is a Bangalore-based consulting firm providing a range of analytics services to global clients and across various domains - consumer banking, insurance, telecom, retail, manufacturing, travel, etc. Services provided include simple MIS and reporting all the way toadvanced analytics, including segmentation, forecasting and predictive models. We are looking for a senior-level executive to lead the Business Development/Sales function in the US. Details: marketelligent_business-development
July 29, 2008Here are some opportunities to hear Neil and James speakCopyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Here are some opportunities to hear Neil and James speak.We have a number of speaking engagements in the next few months and I thought I would highlight them on the blog today. Arranged in date order…
Drop us a line if you are going to be attending any of these and want to meet.
The empire has less staffCopyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at The empire has less staff.Frank posted some great comments on Here’s how to get started with decision management the other day and made me think about this, often very severe, problem. As Frank put it:
This is a real problem with adopting EDM for sure and one I have seen personally in collections organizations, for instance, where the size of the department is a key measure of the power/success/income of managers. In these kinds of circumstances there really is little chance of success without changing these measures. As in all things, the act of measuring something changes it. Measuring managers on the difference between their spend and their income or output is essential if you are to get them on board with the changes that EDM will bring. Often it is not worth tackling this kind of problem first. Instead I often recommend that decisions currently not being taken at all or ones that are already being automated poorly be targeted first rather than the replacement of manual decision making. These decisions may not have the bang for the buck that replacing manual decisions do but they help establish that the approach works without having to deal with the whole empire thing. Frank goes on to make another good point:
Here the problem is not just one of empire size but of the number of little empires involved and the threat to those silos of information sharing. Tackling this problem is also beyond the scope of introducing EDM but it need not be tackled first. While shared information is clearly more useful and more likely to result in better decisions and analytics, it is not essential. Plenty of effective decision management solutions do not use cross-silo data. Indeed connecting decisions across silos is one of the later stages of adopting EDM. The “E” is not meant to imply a need to do enterprise-wide decision management so much as to imply enterprise ownership of decisions - making them explicit (Explicit Decision Management). So the decisions within each silo can be attacked using EDM and can show good results, even if some decisions would require integration of the silos. EDM is a great approach but it needs the same kind of organizational readiness and flexibility that any new development approach does and it can be limited by the politics and performance measurement systems that are in place. You can, and should, “think global, act local” and get started with a focused EDM project because success will make the necessary organizational change easier.
Articles on Operational BI and Competing on DecisionsCopyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Articles on Operational BI and Competing on Decisions.Mike Ferguson posted on his blog a few weeks ago - Operational BI - Extended BI System Or Brand New Architecture? - and this prompted me to write an article for b-eye network - From Operational Business Intelligence to Competing on Decisions. This article is my second on my b-eye-network channel and there will be more there over time so check it (and the rest of the channels) when you get a chance.
First thoughts on the IBM/ILOG announcementCopyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at First thoughts on the IBM/ILOG announcement.I got a chance to speak with ILOG today and do some thinking so it’s time to write more about the IBM and ILOG announcement. As it is an acquisition of one publicly traded company by another neither company can legally say very much. As a result I, like everyone else, have a bunch of questions that will just have to wait - probably to the end of the year when they hope to have the acquisition done. So, given the little we know, what can we say? Overall I am cautiously optimistic about the future of ILOG’s products and the markets and customers they serve. IBM has long shown an interest in both business rules and optimization and their willingness to put real money behind these two decision-making technologies is very encouraging. IBM is also a distributed multi-national company with developers in lots of countries so they should be able to integrate the critical development know-how without too much pain. I don’t expect to see ILOG’s Rules products or its CPLEX optimization technology suffer any lack of investment or support from their new owners once they become part of the IBM family nor do I see much reason to worry that developers, product managers, consultants or architects will feel a sudden urge to be working elsewhere. All of this bodes well for existing and future customers. Part of the challenge for IBM will be deciding how to integrate ILOG’s products into the IBM organization. While the WebSphere BPM/SOA offerings clearly need to be tightly integrated with business rules, so does FileNet (currently in the Information Management group) and so should the data mining and analytics aspects of the Information Management group. Business rules are, for instance, a perfect way to deliver “information on demand”, one of IBM’s core strategies. IBM also has a long standing optimization specialty group and, while their extensive use of ILOG’s CPLEX will clearly continue, the potential for that group moving into rules-based delivery of optimization is potentially very interesting. Business rules has always been challenged by the very breadth of potential uses and IBM will need to organize the new acquisition to make sure that business rules can be fully leveraged across the company’s product lines. Indeed, several of the comments from the press release hints at this potentially very broad use of the ILOG rules products. Like this one:
and this one:
One of the questions this acquisition does leave hanging is what impact it has on both the rules and optimization markets. The optimization market was always a little odd, given the hugely dominant position CPLEX had. Dash Optimization, a distant second and now part of Fair Isaac, never really challenged its hegemony and IBM taking ownership of it will not change that. So no change there. The business rules market is more complex. There has been a lot of discussion recently as to whether there even is such a thing as a business rules market. Business rules can be used for so many things - from decision management to process management, data quality to customer treatment - that defining it as a market is difficult. Personally I think this acquisition means the end of the discussion - there is not going to be a long term business rules software market. With major platform vendors like SAP (Yasu) and now IBM (ILOG) buying rules products to bolster their platforms it seems only a matter of time before Oracle and Microsoft do likewise. With business rules in the platform we will see two potential independent markets where business rules plays a significant part - Business Process Management and Decision Management - but no real independent business rules market. The Business Process Management market, to the extent it remains independent from the platform business, will continue to come under pressure to do a better job of managing business rules. The power of business rules to make process management easier, more agile and more business-friendly means that the technology will continue to play a key role. Either companies will build their own (as Pegasystems has done), buy a smaller rule vendor or use the rules in the platform(s) on which it runs. It is possible an OEM business for business rules engines will continue, just not a real business rules management system market. The event processing market seems likely to move in a similar direction. The emerging enterprise decision management market will also need robust business rules. This market does not need all the features of a traditional business rules management system but it does need deep analytic integration and real decision-centric performance management as well as adaptive control and adaptive analytics. I believe this market has a potential for independence because business decisions cut across systems, platforms and channels. Business rules vendors who don’t wish to become part of a platform should take this route and do so quickly. To wrap up I thought I would pose some questions:
May you live in interesting times…
July 28, 2008Breaking News - IBM to buy ILOG!Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Breaking News - IBM to buy ILOG!.Just heard that ILOG is going to be acquired by IBM! I don’t have any more detail yet but hopefully the folks at ILOG and IBM will brief me sometime soon…..
July 25, 2008If you were making a "3-minute promise" would your systems help or hurt?Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at If you were making a “3-minute promise” would your systems help or hurt?.The folks at CustServ had a piece on The 3-Minute Promise to Avis Customers that made me think. If you wanted to make a similar promise - that some process of yours would be quick, efficient, flawless and seamless - would the systems you have help you or hurt you?
In other words, would your systems be able to handle the operational decisions that have to take place quickly and effectively in these kinds of situations? If you were using enterprise decision management they would.
If you were making a “3-minute promise” would your systems help or hurt?Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at If you were making a “3-minute promise” would your systems help or hurt?.The folks at CustServ had a piece on The 3-Minute Promise to Avis Customers that made me think. If you wanted to make a similar promise - that some process of yours would be quick, efficient, flawless and seamless - would the systems you have help you or hurt you?
In other words, would your systems be able to handle the operational decisions that have to take place quickly and effectively in these kinds of situations? If you were using enterprise decision management they would.
July 24, 2008Learn about the mortgage industry, rules and scorecardsCopyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Learn about the mortgage industry, rules and scorecards.ILOG is running a webinar titled “How to Leverage Scorecards for Accurate Risk Management” on Wednesday, August 6 at 10:00 a.m. Pacific / 1:00 p.m. Eastern. Anthony Garritano, editor of Mortgage Technology magazine, me (James) and Janet Wall from ILOG will share presentation duties and give you a quick look at the mortgage industry, how to use predictive analytics and scoring with rules and some trends that make this a great way to gain a competitive advantage. Hope to see you there.
Credit Scoring in Healthcare. In Healthcare!Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Credit Scoring in Healthcare. In Healthcare!.I saw a post today on medical credit scoring that made me think I should post something about how credit scoring can be used in healthcare. Now saying that, of course, makes everyone nervous - are we talking about refusing people treatment because of their credit score? Why should financial questions like credit worthiness have a place in the delivery of healthcare. Well as much as 30% of patient payments end up being written off as bad debt so whether you are a for-profit or a not-for-profit hospital this is a problem. Not only do you have to spend money on debt collection (money you could have spend on health care) you also have to borrow money to cover the short fall. Using a enterprise decision management (EDM) approach and taking advantage of credit scores is one way to address this. During the admissions process, decision management applications can perform real-time validation of patient-supplied data against medical records and external data sources. By making certain patients are who they say they are and checking that address and other information is complete and correct, providers reduce their fraud risk. Using credit scores and other predictive analytics, an EDM solution can determine the optimal initial payment request for patients based on their particular financial situation. Treatment delivery is separate - this is just about how the patient is going to pay (bill them later, take their credit card, ask for cash or help them with a charitable application). Knowing which patients can and will eventually pay what helps financial counselors to work with patients who need help and minimize the number who go to collections, while also generating maximum revenue for the hospital. Once a patient is discharged, an EDM approach can also be used with overdue accounts to improve collection results and minimize recovery costs. Instead of treating all overdue accounts with the same sequence of dunning letters and calls, providers may, in fact, be able to collect more money by doing less. Analytics can identify differences between accounts that affect payment behavior—dividing patients up into those likely to self-correct, those likely to be influenced by collections treatments and those unlikely to pay under any circumstances. Providers can use this segmentation to save money by making fewer outbound contacts and thereby also reducing the volume of inbound inquiries such contacts generate. This is similar to the usual use of credit decisioning except that you don’t want to decline care because someone can’t pay so much as help them pay for the care they need.
Ask an Expert - a Video BlogCopyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Ask an Expert - a Video Blog.The folks over at b-eye network have a video blog with answers to questions submitted by readers - the Ask an Expert Video Blog. This looks like a fun way to get an answer to any BI, data or analytic decision making question you might have. If you have something you want to discuss, go ahead and use the form on the right hand side of the page to submit them. They can be for me or for one of the other experts on the site. Don’t forget I have a channel on the site - Competing on Decisions and you will find a growing number of articles over there.
Fertile Ground for ROI in BPM - Decisions!Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Fertile Ground for ROI in BPM - Decisions!.Ronan Bradley had an interesting article on ebizQ this week - Fertile Ground for ROI in BPM: Three Unlikely Areas. In it he outlined some areas of banking where business process management (BPM) could deliver an ROI.
What struck me about this, and should strike you, is how decision-centric Ronan’s examples are. Regulation is often about what is allowed or not allowed - what decisions are appropriate in other words. Part of the derivative trade cycle is pricing - making an appropriate pricing decision - and part is about eligibility decisions. Automation of the back-office involves automating lots of know-how - the rules behind decisions. Now I’ll be the first to admit I have a decision-centric point of view but I do find it interesting that three areas of ROI for BPM could have so much to do with decision automation and management.
July 23, 2008Interesting article on Process Management and Decision ManagementCopyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Interesting article on Process Management and Decision Management.My good friends Larry Goldberg and Barbara von Halle have just published an interesting article: The New Frontier: BPM, BDM and SOA. It’s worth a read as it makes some good points about the intersection of BPM and decision management - whether Business Decision Management or Enterprise Decision Management.
July 21, 2008Analytics turn data into opportunity (article)Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Analytics turn data into opportunity (article).Ed Garry of Oracle wrote a piece for Wall Street and Technology called Analytics Help Firms Turn Data Into Opportunity that I found last week. In it Ed talks about Real Time Decisioning platforms that “deliver both rules and predictive analytics to power solutions for real-time enterprise decision management”. Ed is, of course, correct though I would add adaptive control to the list of core capabilities needed for real time EDM. Ed makes lots of good points in the article although he says one thing that might surprise readers of this blog. He says “A central component of enterprise decision management is communicating with sales targets based on their preferences”. Well, clearly enterprise decision management is not only about sales and marketing but even when you consider EDM only in that context it might seem strange to describe preferences as a central component. But think about it for a moment and it makes sense - preferences on the part of a customer or prospect are rules about how they want to be treated. Managing these rules along with the rules that are driven by regulation or policy or mined from your data makes perfect sense. While I am not sure I would describe it as a “central” component it is clearly important as I have said before when discussing personalization.
First Look - ILOG and Relativity for legacy modernizationCopyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at First Look - ILOG and Relativity for legacy modernization.The folks at ILOG and Relativitiy recently announced a new integration between their products - Legacy IT Modernization enabled by ILOG and Relativity Technologies Business Rules Solutions. I got a chance to chat with them today about what was new and different in this latest attempt to bring legacy modernization and business rules together. Relativity’s product line allows a variety of languages (COBOL, Java, PL/1) to be analyzed and the resulting model of the application is stored in a repository. From this they make the information available to developers maintaining or redeveloping code, managers making portfolio decisions etc. Business Rules Manager is one of the products that interacts with the repository and is designed to mine candidate business rules from the model in the repository with an end goal to evolve them to the point of being useful in authoring new rules. In particular their product, they say, helps move the very technical “rules” that come out of code analysis to something more useful. They can differentiate between real business logic and what you might call housekeeping code. The repository allows you to build a business vocabulary that can be assigned to the structures found in the code and thus to the rules. The initial integration with ILOG’s product takes this vocabulary across as well as copybooks etc. This would allow new rules to be authored using the same object model and vocabulary as that established in the model in Relativity. At present the candidate rules remain in the Relativity environment and are not moved into the ILOG repository but these candidate rules and some elements of ruleflow are next on the integration roadmap (though no date has been announced yet). In addition Relativity is working on decision tables and decision trees and the companies expect this to help with integration as many trees and tables should come across more or less wholesale. The current integration is with JRule and takes advantage of some of the features in Rules for COBOL (which I blogged about before). When companies reengineer legacy applications into COBOL one of the most important aspects is impact analysis. Often some of the legacy code is left untouched, some is restructured and some is completely replaced. Ensuring that impact analysis is done right across all of these is often a challenge. The folks at Relativity re register the COBOL generated from ILOG’s product. This code and is structure, comments etc is then in the repository and this code contains information that links to rules artifacts. This allows impact analysis to be done in the Relativity product that will include the impact on code generated from the rules and, indirectly therefore, to the rules themselves. This is clearly a first version of the integration as there are still a number of areas where no work has been done. Besides the obvious lack of integration for candidate rules, there is also no work so far on how a user of the rules environment would be able to access artifacts managed in Relativity to help them write the rules correctly. Similarly no work so far on rule templates. This is important when the legacy code is being replaced with rules because it changes so often. In those circumstances the current values of the rules may be less interesting than the structure of the rules in the code. Taking the structure of the old rules and creating rule templates from them may be more useful than just moving the rules themselves.
July 19, 2008Transpromotional marketing with EDMCopyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Transpromotional marketing with EDM.Transpromotional marketing - yes, another new phrase that I heard for the first time this week. Wooing Customers in a Weak Economy was the source - an article on 1:1. Chris Stone wrote the article and it talks about the need to use different channels to contact customers and to do so consistently and in a personalized fashion - both hallmarks of using decision management of course. The phrase “transpromotional” refers to the use of transactional opportunities, such as statements, to deliver personlized promotions and marketing. Taking this approach requires both an act of will - deciding to use these channels to deliver personalized marketing - and then a focus on the decisions involved. What offer/action is appropriate for this customer? How can I personalize it and make it attractive to them? How do I correctly include risk in my calculations as to what to offer. All of these decisions are classic opportunities for decision management or EDM as they take rules (policies, procedures, customer preferences), analytics (segmentation rules mined from data, predictions of risk and retention as well as opportuinty) and constant testing and refinement or adaptive control. Transpromotional marketing - another use of EDM.
July 18, 2008Is Self-Service good or bad?Copyright © 2008 James Taylor. Visit the original article at Is Self-Service good or bad?.Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe had a column “Self-serve and slave” (that I saw in the San Jose Mercury News as “In a self-serve nation, work gets dumped on us“) in which she rails against self-service and compares it to the outsourcing of work from paid employees to us consumers. As she says:
This perspective was interesting. Speaking personally I often prefer self-service - I don’t like to have to wait for someone to serve me in a shop and I find it irritating to talk to someone who is using an information system rather than using the system myself. Indeed I find many circumstances to be much more efficient when I can self-serve. I suppose that an infinite number of staff available 24×7 might work as well as an ATM say but well designed self-service can make machines (PCs, kiosks, ATMs) do something that otherwise a person would do. Each such automated channel then adds to the number of available staff (typically finite) and so makes it easier for everyone. For a good example, take the check in kiosks at airports. Where there are plenty of kiosks the lines for staff are shorter and I think most people are happier. I guess you could consider me as a glass half-full person when it comes to self service while Ellen might be described as a half-empty person. So, this week’s question is “What do you think - is the self-service glass half-full or half-empty?” Regardless of the perspective you have on this I believe that Enterprise Decision Management has a role to play. Being explicit about the decisions that customers want made makes it more likely that they can get done what they want done (because it is explicitly automated). Because personalization makes it easier and more pleasant to use automated systems, explicitly identifying the decisions that can be personalized i also helpful. Lastly it helps as it allows the expertise necessary to make a good decision to be embedded so you are not making decisions based on TV shows and google searches or the uninformed new hire on the other end of the phone. |
