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December 31, 2006
Book Reviews: Good to Great, Creative Destruction
Two more book reviews, "Good to Great" and "Creative Destruction"
Good to Great first. This book will (probably) terrify you if you work. Clearly outlining critical characteristics of super-successful companies it show over and over again why most companies are not. Think about where you work, and how you invest, in the light of what the authors discuss. Like Execution, another book I really liked (and reviewed here), it analyzes how companies that sustain a high level of effectiveness might do that and gives some practical advice you can follow, whether or not you are the CEO. In addition this book is highly recommended for anyone thinking about becoming a CEO or engaged in a CEO search.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said of Foster and Kaplan's book "Creative Destruction: Why Companies That Are Built to Last Underperform the Market - and How to Successfully Transform Them". The book starts of reasonably well. Its general themes explaining why large companies tend to behave in ways that make them less effective at responding to change than the market are well described. As the book tries to show examples of companies that did or did not respond well to the forces of change in business they lose their way. Not only do they extol a number of companies seemingly purely because they were founded by friends from McKinsey, they also use Enron as a successful example! Too many of their examples have not done well since the book was published and that undermines their message. The book also lacks concrete advice, though I must confess to skimming towards the end. My takeaway? The market as a whole will ALWAYS innovate more effectively than any company so get over it and be prepared for companies to come and go and change constantly. There's not much, if anything, you can do about it. The book should have been subtitled "Why Companies Underperform the Market in the Long Run" as that's really what it comes down to.
You can buy "Good to Great" here and "Creative Destruction" here.
Posted by James Taylor at 5:46 PM | Comments (0)
December 29, 2006
New "Retail" Category Started in the EDM Blog
There are more than 500 retailers worldwide with revenues in excess of $1 billion. Their use of predictive analytics, business rules, and decision automation varies widely. Some of them - such as Best Buy - make extensive use of advanced decision making capabilities as the foundation for successful Customer Centricity initiatives which have driven significant same store sales growth. Others are equipped with large amounts of data about their customers, their products, and millions of transactions, but are yet to grapple with the implications of using that information to its fullest within their businesses.
Even leading commentators on the retail industry predict that predictive analytics will come to the fore during 2007, so it seems that the time is right for James and I to start blogging formally about the many applications of EDM in stores, in online outlets, and anywhere goods are sold.
To this end, we have added a new Retail category to the list of existing categories in use on this blog, and we have even gone back and reclassified a number of our old posts that are relevant to this industry. Some of our recent entries that fit the bill include:
As ever, we invite your comments and insights on our postings. If you have any particular observations of note to the retail industry, please bring them to our attention.
Posted by James Taylor at 1:39 PM | Comments (0)
Predictive Analytics: Aisle 3
(Posted by Guest Blogger, and ardent shopaholic, Ian Turvill.)
It's that time of year again, when we're supposed to make predictions about what the New Year will bring us. And apparently, I'm not alone in that belief, since Susan Reda, Executive Editor of The National Retail Federation's "Stores" magazine has compiled a list of seven things she predicts 2007 has "in store" for us.
Alongside greater use of mobile marketing technology, "fast fashion" (you'll have to read the article to see what that is - it's just too much to explain), greater emphasis on green issues, a difficult economy, and pressure on supermarket formats, she highlights two specific trends that appear to have direct relevance to our EDM blog.
First, Susan Reda says that demographics will assume greater power
"Immigration, aging Boomers and a host of other demographic shifts will be shaping and reshaping the retail landscape for years to come. Retailers who set their sights on micro-merchandising and micro-marketing will triumph; those who run with the herd may find themselves getting trampled."
Another win for Enterprise Decision Management, then! EDM's capability to find trends and to apply them at a highly granular level makes it ideally suited to address this particular challenge. If you know of any retailers who are not regular readers of this blog, I recommend pointing them here so that they are best equipped to deal with the challenges of 2007.
Separately, Susan emphasizes the impact of numerous new technologies on the retail industry, including business intelligence, RFID, contactless payment, and biometrics, as well as predictive analytics. I'm very surprised that Susan did not make more of an explicit link between between the issue of the demographics and the application of predictive analytics. However, she does quite aptly state:
"Retail success is about finding the sweet spot. Doing so requires business intelligence -- predictive analytics that allow you to distill key customer information from a sea of data, capture missed opportunities and smooth out sales anomalies."
Of course, I think James and I would probably extend that further and say that what is required is "actionable business intelligence" and the capacity to apply those insights as a core part of all transaction streams and customer interactions. Susan seems to conflate the ideas of BI and predictive analytics, and as regular readers of this blog all know, there are many reasons why BI and EDM are not the same thing. But we'll certainly accept Susan's point, nevertheless.
I predict that James and I will be blogging a whole lot more about the applications of Enterprise Decision Management in the retail industry the New Year. It seems to be an area that is ripe for some good ol' decision automation!
Posted by James Taylor at 1:10 PM | Comments (0)
The art of the decision
Well hopefully you all saw me on the front page of DM Review - The Art of the Decision. If this is the first time you have seen the blog, welcome! To coincide with the profile I am going to write on some of the key topics that come up talking with Jim. I have posted on some already:
Next up is something on transaction-centric processing. Look for it after the July 4th holiday.
Posted by James Taylor at 12:58 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 28, 2006
Using business rules to write maintainable code
Reddit pointed me to this post on "Writing Maintainable Code" by Jeremy D. Miller over on CodeBetter.com. It's a nice article and I look forward to reading the rest of his posts on this topic.There's lots of good stuff but a number of his comments led me to dig up some of my posts on maintainability and agility:
"Enable Change or Else!" because "Change is a constant in an enterprise software system"
Regular readers will know how much I agree with this. I have written before about how rules can help you love change and construct dynamic applications built with change in mind. Using business rules for core business logic can also help you respond to changing requirements. This is sometimes called business agility and I wrote some notes on agility based on some Gartner research on this topic.
"single most important quality for an enterprise software system is maintainability"
I recently posted on using rules to avoid "write only" code and on using rules to improve the application maintenance process.
Jeremy has "a strong preference for creating maintainable code throughout the codebase" rather than building in points of extensibility.
While I think he is right, I also think that the reality is that some parts of an application will have change driven by business users and some by more technical requirements.. Jeremy asks the question "where should this code go" and I think there should be a follow-up question of "what kind of code should this be". Assuming that everything in an application should be code is a risk as there is a problem with (our expectations of) programmers. After all you have to remember the different perspectives of programmers and business people.
Jeremy then lists some great questions along with proposed approaches to address them. Some of them seem to me to relate very strongly to business rules:
- Can I find the code related to the problem or the requested change?
And once I find it can someone who understands the change also read the code? - Can I understand the code?
And who am "I"? A programmer or someone who runs the business? - Is it easy to change the code?
Can I change the "rules" and put new rules into production without downtime? - Can I quickly verify my changes in isolation?
- Can I make the change with a low risk of breaking existing features?
- Will I know if and why something is broken?
All these points lead to me repeat some of my thoughts on why business rules can be better than code and on business user rule maintenance secrets.
Lastly he has a very strong focus on the value of layering and separation of concerns. He identifies one layer as "Business logic, rules, domain model". Could not agree more.
As an aside he also talks about agile methods. I have posted a virtual conversation with Scott Ambler on rules and agile approaches and an article on the same topic if you are interested.
Technorati Tags: application maintenance, BRE, BRMS, business agility, business rules, change time, maintenance, programmer, programming, agile
Posted by James Taylor at 8:34 AM | Comments (0)
December 27, 2006
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 because it is well written and because, although it drilled into a fair amount of detail about some of the techniques, it started each new section off at a high level. This allows someone without a statistical background, such as me, to read as far as I can in each section and then skip ahead to the next technique. This is a nice change from books that simply get more and more detailed as page follows page, preventing you from gaining an overview of the subject. The book introduces data mining and a methodology for applying it, talks about some of the applications in "Marketing, Sales, and Customer Relationship Management" (as the subtitle puts it), walks through some statistical techniques and then spends the bulk of the book on various data mining techniques. It wraps up with a nice summary of how data mining plays with other technologies and with some practical advice on getting started.
One of the best summaries of where data mining, and indeed EDM, fits is given early in the book where an enterprise is encouraged to:
- Notice what its customers are doing
- Remember what it and its customers have done over time
- Learn from what it has remembered
- Act on what if has learned to make customers more profitable
The authors point out that Data Mining is focused on the "Learn" stage or, as they put it data mining suggests but businesses decide. EDM, of course, is concerned not only with learning but also with acting, most particularly acting by automating decisions in front-line systems. Merely finding patterns is not enough - you must respond to the patterns and act on them, ultimately turning data into information, information into action and action into value.
The methodology section, and the subsequent notes that relate to applying these techniques in real life, talked about the feedback loops between steps in data mining - there is not a linear "waterfall" sequence of steps but constant iteration and learning. They also emphasized the importance of finding the right business problem at the beginning - start as someone once said, with the end in mind. This was reiterated when they quote Voltaire who said "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien" ("The best is the enemy of good"). In other words, don't get hung up on trying to find the perfect algorithm, perfect answer. Instead build something that is good, that works, and learn and improve over time.
The authors made a big point out of the value of data mining for "mass intimacy", where you want to treat customers differently and there is a business reason to do so but where customers are too numerous to be assigned to staff. One of the issues they pointed out was that staff must be trained in customer interaction skills while also using all the data you have. This can be a real challenge and is one of the reasons I prefer an EDM approach, where the decisions those staff need to make are automated, to other approaches. By giving them the decisions they need you free them to work on the relationship (as I have discussed before). The value of data mining, and EDM, in building a customer-centric organization cannot be overestimated.
Some random snippets of useful stuff from the book:
- A model "can result in insight" and "produce scores". The first kind is used in EDM largely to product rules while the second is often embedded directly in the decision services being built
- Analysis can be directed (find the value of something) and undirected (find structure)
- Data visualization is very useful during the initial exploration of information.
- There is some discussion of the difficulty in deploying models when the step involves"a programmer takes a printed description of the model and recodes it in another programming language so it can be run on the scoring platform". EDM's focus on automating the deployment of models into a rules-based decision service is designed to address this issues.
- Besides coding the actual model, data transformations are also a big issue and remain one even in EDM.
- Decision trees are "powerful and popular" for classification and prediction because they can be represented by, and represent, rules. Indeed decision trees are a cross-over artifact between rules and models that are critical in EDM also. One of the things that makes trees particularly useful is because they need less data preparation as they can handle all kinds of variables well.
- The authors emphasize repeatedly the importance of time series data e.g. detecting early signs of attrition by tracking all actions of checking account customers in the time up to when they leave a bank. The time-based signatures thus created are great predictors. They note also that this is one of the weaknesses of data warehouses when using them for analytics - they tend to arrange data by absolute time/date when the analytics are more useful relative to an action or event.
- The value of neural nets is noted but the problems neural nets have with respect to traceability and explicability are also noted. This makes neural nets great for things like fraud detection, where results matter and reasons matter less, and poor for things like credit assessment where regulators expect to see compliance with rules.
- The section on market basket analysis and association rules is very good and describes these forms of undirected analysis well. They point out that these can, if you are not careful, describe the history of marketing promotions rather than genuine decisions to purchase products together. They also give some good examples of using product hierarchies to generalize where some products are much lower volume than others.
- They describe a pyramid with operational data on the bottom, summary data next, the database schema on top of that followed by metadata and finally busienss rules - what's been learned from the data.
- They worry that"rules" are not actionable but I think this is because they focus on rules that describe the data not on rules that describe the actions to be taken
You can buy the book here and it should definitely be on your bookshelf.
Technorati Tags: algorithms, analytic application, business intelligence, business rules, CRM, customer insight, customer segment, decision automation, EDM, Enterprise Decision Management, marketing, predictive analytics, segmentation, statistical analysis, data mining
Posted by James Taylor at 10:42 PM | Comments (0)
December 22, 2006
A Short History of Bad Decisions
(Posted by the most mischievous elf of all, Ian Turvill.)
James just informed me that he had DECIDED to make me a full guest author on his blog.
Apparently he thinks that I've been well enough behaved that he doesn't have to approve every posting I make before it makes its way on the big old World Wide Web.
He may just live to regret that DECISION, because Ladies and Gentlemen, here is James Taylor's Elfamorphosis:
Who knew that James had such great legs?
You can see a fully-animated version of James dressed, dancing, and singing like an elf by clicking here.
I'm sure there are some lessons for Enterprise Decision Management here. (How to predict potential fraudulent elfamorphosization would be a start.) But for now, I just wish you all a great 2007!
(Now I wonder if James is going to send me some coal for Christmas.)
Posted by James Taylor at 9:48 AM | Comments (0)
It's Christmas: Time to Talk about Wars
(Posted by Guest Blogger, and James's little helper elf, Ian Turvill.)
I posted earlier this year about a keynote speech delivered at the ISOTECH conference. In it, I relayed how Frank Coyne, Chairman and CEO of ISO stated:
...breakthroughs in analytics are transforming dynamics in insurance markets. Sophisticated insurers able to harness large volumes of high-quality data to drive decisioning all along the value creation chain can look forward to a long and prosperous future. But insurers unable to keep up in the intellectual and technological arms race face a grim prognosis. [my emphasis]
I have explored and considerably expanded on this theme in the third and final article in my series entitled The 21st Century Insurer in Fair Isaac's online ViewPoints magazine. In it, I argue that one of the most important things that an insurer can do to best position itself and win this both the intellectual and technological arms race is to break out the management and execution of decisions from other core functions in the business.
You can read it and the other two articles in the series by clicking on the links below:
- The 21st century insurer Part 1: Beyond priceâ€Successful responses to shrinking opportunities Introduces new predictive analytics approaches that insurers can adopt to overcome price-based competition
- The 21st Century insurer Part 2: A smarter way to beat the competition Explains how the practice of decision analytics can help insurers optimize across a much broader range of factors when designing rating structures
- The 21st century insurer Part 3: Break out decisions for breakthrough performance Describes how the concept of a centralized Decision Service can dramatically improve the development and execution of decision strategies
(Somewhat shameless commerce:) If you would like to subscribe to future issues of ViewPoints, please click here.
Addendum: 12/26/2006
I was asked by bee to contribute a little more depth to this article (see comments below). The additional materials I'm posting are (unfortunately) of a more commercial nature, since they illustrate the points I've made in these articles in ways that rely on specific Fair Isaac solutions. Nevertheless, I think the general principles that are set out here would apply if any commensurately capable solution were applied.
More information on the ROI of a centralized decision service: Download IDC_ROI_paper.pdf
More information on the use of a decision service as part of an Enterprise Service Bus or Service Oriented Architecture: Download soa_and_rules_wp.pdf
For more details on the optimization techniques described in Part 2, see: Download decision_analytics_white_paper.pdf and Download optimization_white_paper.pdf
Posted by James Taylor at 9:00 AM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2006
Here's a way to take advantage of mobile devices
I saw this post by David Raab over on his blog - Business Intelligence on Smart Phones: Not Just Humbug. Like the author of the original article to which David refers (Power Of A Data Warehouse In The Palm Of Your Hand by Elena Malykhina) I am cynical. Her comment that "It remains to be seen how many mobile professionals actually need to slice and dice data from handheld devices" really struck a chord with me. I don't see even weary road warriors wanting to do "traditional" BI on a smartphone. But as David correctly points out the follow-up question is interesting:
The more intriguing question is what new business intelligence functions a smart phone platform would make possible
Now substitute the works "decision management" for "business intelligence" and I think you are on to something. One of the the differences between BI and EDM is the focus on taking action using insight gained from data rather than showing someone the data and helping them gain some insight. I would say that David's examples are all, in fact, EDM examples. They use the information the phone has (position), insight from the data the company has (fraud likelihood, wait times) to take an action (dispatch the person with the phone to a particular place, tell them to do or not do something). I don't see traditional BI vendors having much to offer here - the whole reporting/OLAP infrastructure they have developed is predicated on knowledge workers doing analysis. If you want to take advantage of mobile devices you need to think about automating decisions for the person holding the device. For instance:
- Use mobile phones held by maintenance engineers to track their location and then use analytics to predict which pieces of equipment are most likely to fail soon and rules to assign the nearest, qualified engineer before sending the directions on where to go to the engineers phone.
- Don't show them reliability graphs or travel times, tell them where to go to make best use of their time
- Use the mobile phone of a real estate appraiser to find out which risk zones a property is in and what the predicted difference is between a house inside and outside that risk zone
- Don't show them a picture of the risk zones
- Use a doctor's mobile phone to route them to the most useful hospital during an emergency based on predictions of patient load, the hospitals they know and their specialties
- Don't show them graphs of wait times and pie charts of specialties needed
- Use a customer's mobile phone to make them an offer at a store that is nearby having predicted that they are likely to buy it, checked that is in stock there and estimated that they are more likely to respond in person than to an email promotion to the website
And so on. Automate decisions and use mobile devices to provide context for those decisions and to deliver decisions to people out and about. Don't send them reports. Please.
I have blogged before about the value of location information in automation of decisions and on location intelligence with EDM and wrote an article in BI Journal (subscription required) with Ed Gandorf of MapInfo "Driving Decision Automation with Location Intelligence".
P.S. An extreme example of this might be something like pay-as-you-drive insurance as described by my colleague Ian.
Technorati Tags: analytic application, analytics, business intelligence, business rules, customer experience, customer insight, decision automation, EDM, Enterprise Decision Management, personalization, predictive analytics, mobile device
Posted by James Taylor at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)
December 20, 2006
Book Review: Execution. The Discipline of Getting Things Done
Over the weekend I finished "Execution. The Discipline of Getting Things Done" by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan. This book is a succinct summary of all that is wrong in many companies. Larry and Ram analyze many of the most dysfunctional behaviors seen in large corporations and lay out some steps to address them. While many of their stories focus on senior management and execution failures, their suggestions and guidelines work just as well for all levels of management. If you are responsible for planning and getting things done, this book will give you some tips and ideas as well as codifying your "gut feel" for why some people just don't get things done. My only complaint with the book was that it did not address the problems of getting your information systems to "get things done". As businesses are increasingly embodied in their information systems I think this is going to become more and more important. Clearly this is my bias but to give you a sense of what I mean, here are some of my favorite quotes from the book with commentary.
-
"when a company executes well, its people are not brought to their knees by changes in the business environment"
But if that company has information systems that do not change easily then it will lack the agility it needs to respond to these changes. In reality most businesses now have information systems that must be changed to cope with a new business environment. If these systems are hard to change, they will be brought to their knees. -
"leaders placed too much emphasis on what some call high-level strategy,...,and not enough on implementation" and "unless you translate big thoughts into concrete steps for action, they're pointless"
Ram and Larry are talking here mostly about the implementation in terms of making sure successive layers in the organization can deliver on the strategy - that all the pieces add up. Again, if the lowest levels of your organization are driven by information systems, or if your customers interact directly with your information systems, you need to also be concerned with the implementation of your strategy in those systems. But most information systems are impenetrable to most business people and so it can be hard to tell, let alone ensure this. -
"If your business has to survive difficult times, it if has to make an important shift in response to change - and these days just about every business does - it's far, far more likely to succeed if it's executing well"
I have written a lot about the need to have agility in your information systems to cope with change but I thought this quote brought home how essential this is. -
"when decision-making is decentralized or highly fragmented, ..., people at many levels have to make endless trade-offs"
In reality people at every level are making trade-offs and you need to decide how to make sure that the right trade-offs are being made even when the trade-off is being made by someone with limited business know-how or by an automated system. Using analytics to embed effective risk management and risk/reward trade-offs will help make the information systems at the bottom of your organization manage this. -
"Behaviors are beliefs turned into actions...They're where the rubber meets the road"
The business rules embedded in your information system are where the rubber hits the road. They decide how your website treats customers, how your IVR system works and so on. Controlling them is essential for turning your beliefs into behaviors.
There were some other interesting sections from an enterprise decision management or EDM perspective. One of the building blocks identified was "insist on realism" and it struck me that this is part of what makes the use of analytics in EDM so powerful. Analytics are, because they are derived from actual data, steeped in realism. Using them to drive decisions can really improve the amount of realism in your decisions. Similarly the use of rules to define how customers are treated allows for a realistic assessment of how they were, in fact, treated in a way that interviewing people and asking them how they treat customers will never be.
Finally I thought the quote about execution below was lovely and very relevant to EDM. EDM is not tactical, it is fundamental to your strategy. If your systems don't follow the rules your strategy implies or use the data on which you based it, how likely are they to do it right?
"People think of execution as the tactical side of business. That's the first big mistake. Tactics are central to execution, but execution is not tactics. Execution is fundamental to strategy and has to shape it"
You can buy the book here.
Technorati Tags: analytics, business agility, business rules, decision automation, EDM, Enterprise Decision Management, risk management, strategy, management
Posted by James Taylor at 5:10 PM | Comments (0)
December 15, 2006
A media story
Some time ago I posted a comparison of how a bank operated with how an EDM process might work (A banking story). Thanks to a friend I have another example is this genre - this time from the news media.
Old Way
A former subscriber to the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) she received an offer in the mail designed to entice her back - the offer included both the print edition and the online wsj.com. The offer came in a personalized letter and had various codes identifying it. The offer came from "The Wall Street Journal. Print amp; Online".
- Deciding to pay online she found a different set of offers with no apparent way to enter any of the codes from the offer letter. Nevertheless one seemed to match and so she signed up for it.
- The first print issue arrived promptly but no information was forthcoming on the online subscription
- A short email conversation ensured which, in the end, yielded an acknowledgment of the deal and instructions for signing up online
- She tried to follow the email instructions but they didn’t work. When it asked for the print account number she got an error message “account already in use” on page 1 of the create account pages
- She called the WSJ online and got a long menu of options which kept repeating what she could do online but otherwise was not helpful. After a long wait she got a Customer Service Rep (CSR). The CSR was confused by the offer but then the CSR said that she had an old account (my friend's a lapsed subscriber remember) and the CSR said it was fixed it right then, My friend tried it and sure enough the error “account already in use” went away
- Having got past page 1 of the process (there are 4), she got to Page 3 which asked which billing period she would prefer. Of course she had already paid so she called back (same long menu, same repeated instructions, some long wait). This time she got another CSR who was also confused by the offer. After reading the notes this CSR said that “print didn’t set up a combo account” and told my friend she had to call them. The CSR transferred her but then she went back in the queue (same long menu, same repeated instructions, another long wait).
- She then got a print CSR who said the system showed that my friend had been a print customer since 2004 and the offer was only available to new subscribers.
- Through gritted teeth my friend explained that the offer was explicitly sent to lapsed subscribers and that it was good for anyone who had not been a subscriber in the last 180 days and furthermore that sheI had been doing this now for 30’ or more and was going to get very cranky. The new CSR read all the (now very long) notes and emails, put her on hold twice, then eventually popped on and said you now have a combo account, wait 24 hours then call online or try again.
- 9 hours later she received an email from the online part of WSJ with instructions to set up the account and it worked.
A long-winded, customer-hostile process that damaged their brand, annoyed a customer and cost them a ton of money in CSR time (while also increasing the delays for everyone else trying to get a CSR with a knock-on customer service impact). How could this have been done better?
EDM way
- The online environment would have had the ability to ask for offer codes or address so as to identify the customer initially
- The online form would have shown the same offer as the offline and created the account the right way the first time
- Even if the customer had lost the code and signed up for the wrong offer online, the CSRs would all have seen the same offers available to the customer as the system would run the eligibility rules and display those for which the customer was eligible. The systems the CSR used would have allowed them all to trigger the allowed decisions, there would be no transferring to different CSRs.
- When signing up for the online service the re-use of the account number would have caused a sensible decision (like questions to see if this person is the same as the one who has the account in the system) not an error message.
- Similarly when it got to the billing part if would have checked the account and seen that a fee had been paid that made the customer eligible for both online and print editions (it would know she was a returning customer who had been gone more than 180 days and who was therefore eligible for the combined service offer and that she had paid the amount associated with that offer). It would then have displayed the existing billing data, confirming the included online subscription and carried on with the rest of the process
Why is this a better process?
Well it's way more consistent - the online and offline experiences are coordinated and the decisions that need to be taken to sign customers up whether they mail in orders, use the web or talk to a CSR are all automated correctly. CSRs are empowered to focus on the customer because the system knows what decisions are allowed for each and tells the CSRs so that they can execute them quickly and easily and without the risk that they will approve something they should not. The online environment would have run rules at each step to see if additional data was required so that it did not repeat questions or get confused. Some kind of smart form would have been displayed that responded intelligently at each in the process.
Technorati Tags: business rules, customer experience, decision automation, marketing, media, personalization
Posted by James Taylor at 4:27 PM | Comments (0)
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 considered a form of algorithm, it made me want to talk about enterprise decision management or EDM in this context. Let's start with the key concept:
As more human behaviors emit trails of digital residue, the more opportunities reside for algorithms to harness those human-induced data and become information intermediaries
Absolutely right. And these data are available in such volume that reporting on them is not going to help anyone - you have to build insight from the data so that you can use it, not just report on it with BI. This means building predictive analytic models based on the data that can be embedded into your operations - algorithms in other words. In reality you must also combine rules - about the user's preferences so as to maximize the customer's influence on decisions and about policy and regulation to ensure compliance. This is particularly true for any business subject to the Long Tail. Automating decisions in this way can let you improve the customer experience and scale 1:1, personalized communication to thousands or millions of customers.
As Max says, "all behaviors .. create halos of metadata, which algorithms process, mediate and disperse to others" and you need to account for all this information in your decisioning. Max gave some examples of algorithms and I thought it would be fun to show how EDM-like some of them were:
-
Restaurant recommendation
Well you could use predictive algorithms to segment people by the kind of restaurants they like/use and to build recommendations by comparing to other people. The customer can set rules for price, location etc as well and the combination comes up with restaurants. -
Real-estate
Looks like this one was just rules - rules from the customer about properties in which they are interested -
Travel
More preference rules plus models predicting occupancy and handling dynamic pricing as a result -
Music playlists
Rules and predictions for like and dislike -
Fraud
Rules and analytics, a classic EDM one.
Technorati Tags: analytic application, analytics, business rules, customer experience, customer insight, customer segment, decision automation, EDM, Enterprise Decision Management, fraud, long tail, marketing, predictive analytics, algorithms
Posted by James Taylor at 2:12 PM | Comments (0)
December 14, 2006
Book Review: The World Is Flat
I have just finished reading "The World Is Flat" by Thomas Friedman. Firstly a health warning - it's a REALLY long book. Even skimming some sections it took me a long while to read it. Overall it is a good if somewhat long winded read. As someone working in technology I found it a little patronizing in places but that could just be a function of its target audience not working day to day with some of the technologies he's discussing. The book lays out a series of trends and technologies that have, in his phrase, flattened the world by making it more interconnected than ever before. He goes on to discuss how this fits with globalization, how companies are reinventing themselves in the face of these changes, some of the problems and risks and what kinds of political and public policy impacts it might all have.
I was reading this in the context of Enterprise Decision Management, EDM, and several concepts introduced in the book resonated with me.
The first is the idea that deciding where to source work is becoming more complex. There are more options with advantages and disadvantages than ever thanks to the overall increase in interconnectedness. For instance, Thomas discussed how JetBlue reservations use "homesourcing" and are 30% more productive in terms of bookings made and how other companies are outsourcing call centers, for example:
"There are currently about 245,000 Indians answering phones from all over the world or dialing out to solicit people for credit cards or cell phone bargains or overdue bills"
Thomas points out that
"Homesourcing to Salt Lake City and outsourcing to Bangalore were just flip sides of the same coin - sourcing."
or as Thomas Koulopoulos called it when I heard him speak recently, Smartsourcing. Thomas K. also gave a presentation called The road to Agra that touched on these same topics. Thomas F. explains that the work that will go where it can be done most effectively and that increasingly only "creative, complex strategies" will be done in developed world if it is possible to say "I am getting the grunt work done efficiently far away. " Now this last phrase made me think about EDM in this context. Why would I have the "grunt work" done far away if I could automate it and control it locally? Much of what EDM delivers is the automation of grunt work, decisions in workaday transactions that do not really require intelligence to make - just the application of rules and analytic insight. So when considering sourcing the various pieces of your process you should consider if you need a person at all - perhaps you can use an EDM approach and automate a step rather than outsourcing it. Even if you decide that a piece of the process should be outsourced or homesourced or moonsourced or what ever then you still have to think about how you can control this sourced process. Will you just rely on policy manuals and training? Will you assume that the folks making decisions on your behalf can interpret data correctly from their reports and apply your business strategy to what that data tells them? Perhaps you should automate those decisions so that you can control the logic in them even though they are sourced and so your unique data can be used to go beyond BI and actually inform how they work. In the case of the homesourced booking agents, wouldn't you want to make sure they offered your best travelers upgrades when they could and knew how to prioritize customers that needed re-routing as well as what upsell to make to whom? What about the 245,000 phone operators? Would it help if they had an automated system for approving credit or for telling what kid of collections strategy would work? Of course it would. And think about the legal issues here - who's on the hook for the legality of the behavior of these folks? Not the Indian outsourcer but you. Can you show that the decisions they took were legal, compliant, unbiased etc? Not if the decision is manual. Let's make this concrete using one of Mr. Friedman's own examples. Here's what he says:
"In the coming phase of work flow, here is how you will make a dentist appointment: First, there will be a common standard for making dental appointments with any dentist. You will instruct your computer by voice to make an appointment. Your computer will automatically translate your voice into a digital instruction. It will automatically check your calendar against the available dates on your dentist's calendar and offer you three choices. you will click on the preferred date and hour. The week before your appointment, your dentist's calendar will automatically send you an e-mail reminding you of the appointment. The night before, you will get a computer-generated voice message by phone, also reminding you of your appointment".
Now leaving aside Thomas' belief in the growth of standards to cover everything, let's think about this scenario with EDM:
- You will instruct your computer by voice to make an appointment.
- Your computer will automatically translate your voice into a digital instruction.
- It will automatically check your calendar against the available dates on your dentist's calendar and offer you three choices. you will click on the preferred date and hour.
- In an EDM enabled process it would use your rules and predictions of when you are likely to want an appointment to make the three selections
- In theory the dentist might have rules constraining appointments (new patients, cleaning only etc) and these would be included in the decision-making
- A prediction for the length of time you would be at the dentist, given the kind of appointment and previous experience with you and patients like you, and the likelihood of a follow-up might constrain these choices further and even, perhaps, suggest pre-booking of the follow-up appointment
- Information about your choice would be used to improve the model of your preferred slot
- The week before your appointment, your dentist's calendar will automatically send you an e-mail reminding you of the appointment.
- You would have set rules both for when you wanted to be reminded and how so that this decision was personalized
- A model predicting the likelihood of you being late or missing the appointment might cause additional activities such as a live call if you are a high risk for missing it
- The night before, you will get a computer-generated voice message by phone, also reminding you of your appointment.
- Similarly this would be customized to suit you
- The system that called you would give you various options (confirm attendance, say you might be late, cancel) and these options might reflect your particular coverage (yours might say "Cancel and pay a cancellation fee" for instance)
- If you cancel your session an automated conversation would be started to capture a new booking time and a decision would be taken as to who to call and offer the short-notice visit to (given the length of appointment etc).
- Staffing and scheduling of people and equipment for the actual visit might be dynamically altered based on the results of all this
Lots of decisioning making the process more personalized, more efficient and more agile.
Another area of interest highlighted in the book was that of global, dynamic supply chains. In particular the Walmart supply chain and its immediate responsiveness was discussed alot. The move to real-time or just-in-time manufacturing and delivery was highlighted in the phrase
"[coordinate] disruption-prone supply with hard-to-predict demand"
Thomas describes a number of scenarios where companies are making rules-based decisions to keep these automated supply chains moving. However, he also talks about sharing data as a critical aspect of these supply chains. I don't have a problem with that, per se, but it seems to me what companies need in these circumstances is not data but insight from that data, Is it more useful for me to tell you I just sold one of your items or to tell you that I am predicting to run out of them next Thursday? As we add RFID and generate yet more data I believe the value of insight will exceed the value of raw data by an ever increasing margin and that automation of decisions that take advantage of that insight will be key. As Thomas quotes in the book:
"In this world a smart and fast global supply chain is becoming one of the most important ways for a company to distinguish itself"
Note the use of "smart" here. I might say "smart enough" - there's no need to try and embed artificial intelligence or anything in them to make progress.
The need for business agility came up again and again. For instance supply chain problems were highlighted as being
"exacerbated by the short life cycle of product today... Innovation is happening much faster, and so products go in and out of fashion much faster"
and the example of Spanish retailer who works on the basis that it is more profitable to have shortages and then respond REALLY fast to them. This company is taking customer preferences and feeding them into a rapid turnaround system to meet new demand. Clearly customer preferences can be expressed as rules and used to do this but, again, I could not help feeling that predictive analytics might both improve the decision and act as an early warning that a decision is needed.
There were also a couple of nice examples of what I would consider EDM applications. There was a story about UPS developing a system that allows US Customs to specify rules for inspection. This shows what I mean by outsourcers having to allow customer some control over the rules in their system. But what about prediction? As data on contraband and other issues is gathered it should be possible to have the system predict the risk of certain packages being problematic and routing them for inspection even though they don't fail any of the specific rules. The combination of explicit rules and data-driven analytics has proven enormously successful in fraud detection, it would work here too. Similarly in the story about embedding intelligence into Rolls Royce engines to allow for remote diagnostics to see, for example, what to do about a lightning strike, there are clearly rules but there could also usefully be analytics.
A few final thoughts:
-
"But first you need your own customers - your own distinctive competency for your company"
and if you are going to run a distributed and largely automated company, you had better be able to embed that distinctive competency into your systems -
"digital, mobile, virtual and personal"
Carly Fiorina's comment on the future still stands and EDM matters because personalization across mobile channels requires the kind of deep personalization only an EDM approach can deliver -
there is social pressure on the global supply chain
Not all compliance issues are about external regulations, some of them are about ethical compliance and self-regulation. Are your automated systems behaving ethically?
You can buy the book here.
Technorati Tags: analytic application, analytics, BPMS, BRMS, business agility, business intelligence, business process management, business rules, decision automation, EDM, Enterprise Decision Management, knowledge worker, offshoring, outsourcing, personalization, predictive analytics, strategy, supply chain
Posted by James Taylor at 3:46 PM | Comments (0)
Using EDM to deliver competitive productivity
A friend (Hi Ken) referred me to this post about search by David Berlind. Now while I think unstructured text in decision automation and Enterprise Decision Management or EDM is going to be more and more important and while I realize I have not blogged much about unstructured text analysis (note to self, write post on this), I actually wanted to drill down in David's phrase "competitive productivity". Here's how he introduced it:
To businesses with a lot of information workers, any technological advancements that can whittle that 25 percent [time spent searching for information] down to 20, 15, 10 or even 5 percent means that respectively, those workers can be spending 5, 10, 15 or event 20 percent more of their time on tasks that contribute more directly (more directly than searching) to competitive advantage. In fact, freeing up time to focus on those activities that contribute to competitive advantage †long-hand for what I'm going to start calling "competitive productivity" (versus plain ole' "productivity")
This is a great concept and highly relevant to anyone thinking about EDM. EDM is about automating and improving decisions, particularly those that require some expert judgment or for which some data exists that could be used to make or improve the decision. Clearly these decisions are often those taken by information workers - underwriters in insurance, loan officers, ad pricing managers, materials master designers, supply chain managers, staffing schedulers, diagnostic engineers, eligibility managers and so on. If I can automate these decisions, at least the most common 85-90-95%, then I likewise free up their time to work on more complex, high-value tasks.
Now some of this is going to overlap - some of the 25% of time spent searching for information is going to be included in the time saved by not having to make the decision manually because it is information being sought to make a decision. I suspect, however, that most of the benefit is additive. The time spent searching for information is probably in support of the most complex decisions and those therefore most likely to be in the small percentage still referred for manual review. The process of automation will free up some of this time though because you will get a lot more context for the referred decision and this will make it easier to search for information. For instance, a referred policy that needs manual underwriting will say why it is being referred and that will focus the need to search for information down to just the information that will resolve that issue.
Each of the case studies above shows how different decisions can be automated and how they free up information worker time for "competitive productivity".
Technorati Tags: BRE, BRMS, business rules, decision automation, decision service, EDM, Enterprise Decision Management, information worker, search, knowledge worker









