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February 28, 2007
"Blogging Live" from InterACT Lisbon: "How EDM Really Works"
(Posted by Guest Blogger, and Corresponding Secretary of the James Taylor Fan Club, Ian Turvill.)
I attended James Taylor's session How EDM (Enterprise Decision Management) Really Works yesterday. First, I should state that it was exceedingly well attended, with probably more than 100 people in the room - which is a very positive sign, given the total number of people overall at the conference.
There were a number of key points he made, and which I thought were worth repeating here. In addition to my commentary below, I've also included most salient slides from James's presentation. I'm not going to reproduce the whole deck here - you have to pay and attend if you want to see the whole thing! ;-) James will be repeating the presentation at InterACT San Francisco, so you can catch the whole thing there.
One of the most important elements in James's presentation was the concept of Hidden Decisions. This will be one of the central themes in James's planned new book Smart (Enough) Decisions, and it encompasses the idea that many companies are - for a variety of reasons - simply unaware of the complete range of decisions they make.
For example, decisions may be hidden, because they are not automated, but instead made on an almost unconscious basis by employees at the front line of interactions with clients: think about tellers at banks or ticket agents at airport gates. (See Slide 1 to see further examples of Hidden Decisions.)
A further key point in James's presentation was why Enterprise Decision Management is becoming increasingly necessary for companies wanting to maintain their competitive edge:
First, the range of available analytical capabilities is evolving and maturing rapidly. (See Slide 2.) Where companies once relied on straightforward descriptive and predictive analytics, there are now evolving to use of decision optimization, where the profit maximizing action for a specific set of circumstances can be readily prescribed.
Second, there's no point developing models if you can't actually deploy them within systems quickly: the perfect model is of no use if you can't actually deploy it as part of your operations. The range of technologies that companies rely upon to put analytics into action is growing, but the problems associated with each are growing. (See Slide 3.) James would - obviously, but correctly - state that EDM can be the salve for these problems.
Third, many managers might believe that, if an IT system has to change, then there must have been something wrong when it was created. The problem is that most decisions - and therefore the systems that support them - should not be like that: they should change as a matter of course, because the decision making approach should evolve to reflect the changing circumstances of the market.
EVEN IF the environment were static (an unlikely situation), you would STILL want your decision making approach to change to see if you can improve outcomes. There are two standard approaches companies use to adapt their decision-making strategies over time (see slide 4): Champion/Challenger testing, which pits new tactics against existing operational methods, and Learning Strategies (sometimes known as Experimental Design) which tests many different alternative approaches in a systematic way.
Of course, Enterprise Decision Management provides a high level of automation and support to help users to evolve to the best possible decision making strategy.
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Posted by James Taylor at 10:31 AM | Comments (0)
InterACT Lisbon: Record Attendance
(Posted by Guest Blogger, and one of many proud InterACT conference organizers, Ian Turvill.)
We're very proud about the success of InterACT this year. As the Fair Isaac press release that crossed the wire this morning said:
More than 300 business leaders from over 40 countries are attending the three-day forum, demonstrating the fast-growing demand worldwide for innovative technologies and strategies that drive smarter decisions.
Fair Isaac’s InterACT conference is the world’s leading forum on business analytics, emerging decision management technologies and their applications. Executives attend InterACT to learn about the latest strategies for success in critical decision areas including risk management, fraud protection, customer acquisition and retention, collections and recovery, and underwriting. They also experience the newest innovations in predictive analytics and decision automation technology. InterACT is sold out, and attendees represent a range of industries including financial services, retail, telecommunications, insurance and technology providers.
Perhaps most telling of all, our new CEO, Dr. Mark Greene said to InterACT's participants in his keynote presentation:
“Your presence here and your use of Fair Isaac technology to make your very best customer decisions indicates that you represent some of the world’s most visionary organizations.
Perhaps the same thing should be said of readers of this blog. Let me paraphrase:
“Your subscription to this blog and your use of Enterprise Decision Management to make your very best customer decisions indicates that you represent some of the world’s most visionary organizations.
Don't forget: Registration for InterACT San Francisco is open at www.FairIsaac.com/InterACT. If you're not here in Lisbon this week, we look forward to seeing you on the West Coast in May!!!
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Posted by James Taylor at 8:44 AM | Comments (0)
InterACT Lisbon: Shameless Commerce Caveat
(Posted by Guest Blogger, and Legal Eagle, Ian Turvill.)
James and I are putting up this entry as a general caveat for all InterACT-related posts that follows.
InterACT is billed primarily as The Smarter Decisions Conference, with the intent to share key insights into how Enterprise Decision Management can be put into action. But it is also a Fair Isaac-related client and prospect event, so there is necessarily a certain degree of shameless commerce. So, to make it clear, while James and I will try to avoid being cheerleaders for Fair Isaac in our posts, all entries should at least be interpreted or viewed in this light.
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Posted by James Taylor at 8:41 AM | Comments (0)
February 27, 2007
Blogging "LIVE" from InterACT: Action Plan for InterACT
What can you think about as you attend?
- How could we link decisions together?
- How consistent are we at making some of these decisions?
- What data do we have that might be useful?
- How quickly do I need to change this decision?
- How often? What kinds of questions can you ask as you attend?
- How would this analytic technique help me use my data?
- What other decisions might work this way?
- What channels is this decision relevant to?
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Posted by James Taylor at 2:28 PM | Comments (0)
February 26, 2007
Microsoft BPM adds decision management
Some of you will no doubt have seen today's announcement of a Business Process Alliance by Microsoft (their press release is here). Fair Isaac is one of the 10 companies in this alliance (see the Fair Isaac press release here). Interestingly a couple of BPM vendors are also in the 10, including one of Fair Isaac's partners (Metastorm).
Personally I think this is interesting for several reasons:
- It shows Microsoft getting more serious about "real" BPM support
- Like most serious BPM companies, Microsoft recognizes that decision management, using business rules, is important also
- Fair Isaac already uses many of these Microsoft technologies in conjunction with business rules managed in Blaze Advisor (in ScoreNet for instance) so we know this works
- Because Blaze Advisor supports the integration of predictive models into decision services built with it, this alliance means that decisions using rules and analytics can be deployed effectively into processes being managed on .NET.
- Microsoft is upgrading its BPEL support and that will aid in adoption
There's a lot about decision management in BPM on this blog and my other one.
You know, on balance this should have had a shameless commerce warning. oh well.
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Posted by James Taylor at 7:54 AM | Comments (0)
Book Review - The Halo Effect
I just finished reading Phil Rosenzweig's book "The Halo Effect...and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers". This book takes aim at the general run of business books and, in particular, their tendency to dress up vivid stories as scientific study. Phil does not seem to have anything against stories per se, nor does he disagree with some of the advice given in the books. What he takes issue with is the focus on a single, definitive "scientific" set of recommendations when there is no real scientific rigor behind them. He lays out 9 specific delusions and shows how they distort the advice in management books:
- The Halo Effect - tending of analysis of a company to reflect only the overall results
- The Delusion of Correlation and Causality - the lack of proof of causality in many situations
- The Delusion of Single Explanations - one factor is unlikely to be the reason for success or failure
- The Delusion of Connecting the Winning Dots - problems with only considering "winners"
- The Delusion of Rigorous Research - mistaking large volumes of data for good data
- The Delusion of Lasting Success - most companies trend to the mean eventually
- The Delusion of Absolute Performance - companies can do well and still fail if a competitor does better
- The Delusion of the Wrong End of the Stick - successful companies may do various things but that does not mean that doing those things will make you successful
- The Delusion of Organizational Physics - business organizations are just not that predictable
Phil uses various stories to show how the perception of companies and leaders changes when the company's performance does. He also shows how the vivid but unscientific stories that arise from this are then used as evidence by later studies. He repeatedly makes the point that the business world is not a laboratory but a messy and complex world and that this limits our ability to do analysis. He shows that rather than a specific behavior leading to strong company performance, the behavior is at least as likely to be caused by strong company performance. He likens this to Cargo Cults who hope to get planes full of goods to return by recreating the look of a jungle airstrip, mistaking cause and effect. The overall effect is to make you take most management books with a large pinch of salt - not ignoring them, but recognizing that they are just stories, not science.
From an Enterprise Decision Management perspective there was one comment that really resonated. He quoted Tom Peters:
"To be excellent, you have to be consistent. When you're consistent, you're vulnerable. Yes, it's a paradox. Now deal with it."
It seems to me that this is where EDM can really help. Automating a decision allows you to be consistent and supports excellence. Yet EDM ensures that this automation is easy to change and adapt as competitors take advantage of the inherent vulnerability of consistency. When it comes to the decisions that drive your execution, you can have your cake and eat it too.
You can buy it here and if you are, like me, an avid reader of management books, you should.
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Posted by James Taylor at 6:50 AM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2007
How Do You Know I'm in London Today?
(Posted by Guest Blogger, and sometime London Transport rider, Ian Turvill.)
So, how would you know that I was in London today. What form of analytics would tell you that I was working from our office next to the Thames?
Well, it's a well known fact about Londoners that if you wait for a bus, and have to wait a long time, then three of them will turn up at the same time. I think this is because they all just stuck behind each other traffic, whereas other vehicles can overtake them. Alternatively, or perhaps additionally, as soon as the buses get close together, then whichever bus is in front gets slowed down by taking on passengers, while the other buses can just zip on by. And I believe, I've seen it happen many times for real.
So, blogs must just be the same. I haven't posted for days, and three blog entries come along in a row.
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Posted by James Taylor at 1:29 PM | Comments (0)
Blogging Live from InterACT: Preview
(Posted by Guest Blogger, and PowerPoint jockey, Ian Turvill.)
Next week is Fair Isaac's almost annual European client conference InterACT. James and I will be presenting.
I'm really looking forward to James's presentation How EDM Really Works, which is billed as follows:
This session will introduce you to Enterprise Decision Management (EDM): the business discipline of giving high-volume, operational decisions greater precision, consistency and agility. See how your organisation can automate and improve decisions by separating the process of making decisions from your existing business systems. Get an introduction to different kinds of analytics descriptive, predictive and decision and see how they can lead to more precise and profitable decisions. We’ll show case studies of how companies have applied Enterprise Decision Management across the customer lifecycle to grow more profitably. This introductory session is intended for business-level decision makers and those looking for an overview.
I will be presenting How to Calculate Your Decision Yield, along with John Sandifer, who leads our financial services practice in Europe, and Joe LaLuzerne, who is instrumental in our corporate strategy. It is described thus:
How do you turn decisions from an abstract concept into a competitive advantage? Through its work in multiple industries, Fair Isaac has developed both a structured approach to delivering Enterprise Decision Management and a multi-faceted metric called the Decision Yield. If you're interested in taking a holistic look at the way your company makes decisions today, and how to measure the results of new processes and technologies, join us for an overview of best practices in EDM.
I believe Fair Isaac will be making recordings of every presentation, and I'm hoping that we will be able to make the more interesting excerpts from these recordings available through our Decisions Podcast. James and I also intend to divvy up the most pertinent sessions between us and report on them LIVE from InterACT, as has been our practice in the past.
If you won't be coming to Lisbon next week, then you should certainly consider attending our North American InterACT conference, which takes place in San Francisco, May 15-18. It is even bigger than our European event, and this year it features dedicated one day tracks on the use of EDM in particular industries outside financial services, including insurance, retail, telecom, healthcare, and pharmaceuticals, as well as our traditional emphasis on financial services. We've even introduced a new track on Customer Centricity, which is hot topic at firms across many industries.
These tracks are in addition to our regular focus on the technologies and approaches of Enterprise Decision Management including rules, analytics, optimization, and decision automation, as well as specific sessions on Fraud and (yet more) Analytics.
Make sure you register soon!
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Posted by James Taylor at 1:21 PM | Comments (0)
EDM Looks Good On You
(Posted by Guest Blogger, and someone who has only worn makeup for high school plays - a comment that makes sense when you read the article - Ian Turvill.)
Here's an interesting potential application of EDM, in a very different environment: the cosmetics counter.
A recent article in eWeek tells of tests involving retail chain Mitsukoshi, cosmetics company Shiseido and RFID vendor Fujitsu that offers consumers a virtual real-time makeup session featuring a camera-equipped kiosk, display and RFID tag reader that will enable customers to view on the display how particular products would look on their face by waving tagged cosmetic products such as lipsticks or eyeshadows over the tag reader.
What intrigued me was how the trial will also involve touch-screen displays will allow customers to view word-of-mouth information about the products from other customers by waving tagged testers over the tag readers.
Very interesting.
But what if the system could also use rules and analytics to guide the store staff to say the right things about the customer's appearance that would most likely drive them to purchase? For example, a rule might be: if customers puts on an orange lipstick, and if the customer has green eyes, tell them how the two colors complement each other. (Do Japanese have green eyes? Dunno.)
Or how about this? What if the system monitored the sequence in which lipsticks are tried and scanned, and then made recommendations to the customer on other colors to try, based on what path it's seen other customers follow through the various hues! (See a recent ViewPoints article on a similar mechanism for analyzing purchase paths.)
Obviously, the displays should also be set up to make offers. If the customer has tried on 50 lipsticks, and still hasn't bought anything, then give them the chance to buy 3 for the price of one, because they plainly don't know their own mind and have to be given a larger selection.
The trials started Jan. 26 and are scheduled to run through Feb. 12, all sponsored by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. Is anyone from the Ministry ready to blog for us on this project?
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Posted by James Taylor at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)
Business Intelligence: What Are You Thinking?
(Posted by Guest Blogger, and BI Skeptic, Ian Turvill.)
I'm working in London today, ahead of next week's InterACT Conference in Lisbon, and I've been so busy juggling responsibilities across time zones that, first of all, I deleted my daily CIO Insight email from my inbox. But when I considered the title of one of the stories listed in it (Business Intelligence: What Are You Thinking?), I knew that James would never forgive me for passing up the opportunity to blog on it.
Por que?, you ask. (That's Portuguese.)
Well, let's see: because James has written extensively on the shortcomings of Business Intelligence, and why organizations should consider not just the insights they garner from their data, but also how they can convert those insights into action through Enterprise Decision Management.
When I clicked on the article, I saw that the author had much the same opinion:
I believe routine business decisions should be as automated as possible. After all, when a decision is routine and you understand the rules well enough, that decision can be made by softwareusing a decision engineacting on those rules in a consistent, unbiased and auditable fashion. We've seen a lot of examples of this over the past few years, such as program trading in securities, granting consumer credit, mortgage origination, inventory management, and support-desk escalation processes.
Amen, brother! We're singing from the same hymn book!
Plainly, however, the author is not a regular reader of our blog, because he continues:
Because this is a new category, these tools tend to be a collection of not-yet-very-well-connected ideas from different sources.
Obviously, while James and I wouldn't dispute that there are many different sources, but we hope at least that no one would call our thinking not-yet-very-well-connected.
So, here are some immediate suggestions that perhaps the author, John Parkinson, could add to his thinking repertoire.
- Enterprise Decision Management (expanding on the idea of decision engines) is a systematic approach to automating and improving decisions. Through business rules management technology and advanced predictive analytics, EDM can give your most critical, high-volume, operational decisions greater precision, consistency and agility.
What's missing from Mr. Parkinson's treatment is any sense of analytics. Decision automation has to combined rules AND analytics; otherwise, the sophistication of decision making is just insufficient.
Here's another thought.
-
To determine what constitutes a “good” decision process, it is critical that executives understand the many different facets of a decision that contribute to overall business performance.
This holistic way of evaluating decisions is what we call Decision Yield.
Decision Yield is designed to evaluate automated decisions which are typically: customer-facingfrom approving loans to pricing insurance to determining cross-sell offers; very frequentoften many thousands of times a day; driven by strategies and rules, and often supported by predictive models, decision models and optimization; executed in real-time (credit overlimit approval) or in batch mode (matching an offer with a prospect).
John emphasizes that decision engines should be able to act on chosen strategies in a consistent, unbiased and auditable fashion. The concept of Decision Yield suggests a broader set of measures are needed. Consistency is certainly important, but precision (making the right decision), agility (changing decision strategies quickly), and the speed and cost of decision making are also very important.
There's obviously a lot more that could be said on this topic, much of which is distributed through this blog. We certainly invite John to take a look and contribute his thoughts about how this category might develop. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an opportunity to offer comments on the CIO Insight site: Perhaps a quick email to the editors will suffice.
Important caveat to this article:
It's not ENTIRELY clear to me from Mr. Parkinson's article, if he is conflating the concept of decision automation, which revolve around embedding decision-making into operational systems, with the idea of decision support, which centers on creating the strategies that the operational systems will apply; or if they are instead entirely different ideas for him.
Perhaps I need a thinking machine to aid my comprehension?
In any event, I think the points I make above still hold true, because EDM really applies to both needs: the offline development of strategies in a flexible, analyst-friendly environment, and then inline application of strategies in the very many application types John mentions.
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Posted by James Taylor at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)
Is decision management a solution to Seth's problem?
Seth Godin had a post recently - Starting over with customer service - and, while I agree with much of his set up I think the solution is different. Why not empower those people collecting good information to give an actual answer? Why not automate as many of the customer treatment decisions as possible so that when they enter the information they can give the customer both the right response and an immediate one? Not only do customers appreciate the speed of response (see this post) but they will also appreciate being able to self-serve when those same automated decisions are available through the website. I have blogged about this before in the context of gethuman.org.
Your front-line staff cannot deliver good customer service unassisted but that does not mean you should give up on providing service immediately.
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Posted by James Taylor at 8:54 AM | Comments (0)
EDM for IT Operations
I saw an interesting article on DM Direct (DM Review's email newsletter) today - Leveraging Decision Automation in Database Administration. In it Venkat Devraj makes an interesting case for using decision automation, what I would call decision management, to automate database administration tasks. His notes about why scripts are a rotten approach to this kind of automation are perfect and apply to all possible uses of decision management.
Staying on an IT operations front it made me wonder what else might be amenable to decision management. How about these:
- Network reconfiguration when equipment is added/removed/fails
- Engineer assignment to problem equipment using location, urgency, skills etc
- Monitoring the network to see which service level agreements are going to be breached and proactively informing the agreement holders
- Routing helpdesk calls based on source, urgency etc
- Managing backup schedules using rules and predictive analytics to optimize the approach
- Self-service diagnostics for patches and versions to help people set up valid stacks (like Sun Preventive Services for instance)
I am sure there are others but these were just ones that popped into my head based on customers, especially in telecommunications. I am not sure what the prompt for using EDM to manage these might be (in terms of scale) but an IT department that believed in the approach and was having a hard time selling it to the business might consider them as internal proof points.
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Posted by James Taylor at 8:29 AM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2007
Why your offshore IT provider doesn't need domain knowledge
I saw this post yesterday on the Infosys blog - Is IT-Business/Domain Knowledge overrated? - and it made me wonder - does an offshore IT provider need domain knowledge at all? Are there ways to build systems that take much of the IT work, and even some of the process execution work, offshore without having to take the business domain knowledge with it?
If you are a regular reader of my blog you will probably know my answer - yes there is a way. I believe that the future of business process outsourcing involve business rules. With this approach the offshore team does not need much if any domain knowledge as the business users and business analysts will develop and maintain the rules that drive the system/process. This helps avoid shipping critical business know-how offshore and lets you develop your core IP onshore while still developing, and executing, much of the process offshore. Indeed it can help you build a powerful SOA-enabled, rules-enabled platform for BPO. Processes and systems built offshore that allow the customer to inject their domain knowledge using business rules also enables them to to provide differentiation, for example in insurance processes that are outsourced, rather than having to tolerate "vanilla" processes.
Both John Hagel's book The Only Sustainable Edge and Tom Koulopoulos's book Smartsourcing are worth reading. I blogged about a presentation Tom gave at a recent conference here.
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Posted by James Taylor at 2:55 PM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2007
Mitigating the risks of reuse with business rules
Dian over at BPM Enterprise had this post that led me to this piece on The RIsks and Rewards of Reuse by Marcia Kaufman of Hurwitz amp; Associates. Dian highlighted the problem of "Poor Process" as an issue from a BPM point of view but I was struck by a second point Marcia made - Poor Management of Code. She says:
"it goes without saying that the software code that codifies a specific business service may also change frequently"
and thus if you reuse the service widely you may have problems when it needs to change. It seems to me that business rules offers two benefits that help with this.
Firstly the use of business rules to define the service makes it easier to modify it and manage it over time. Not only do business rules help eliminate write-only code, they also allow more effective IT and business collaboration on the logic of the service. Because the business and IT can work together on the business rules changes are more likely to be right and more likely to be understood by the business, reducing impact analysis problems. In addition business rules can be easily reused between services, while still being managed once in a rule repository. This allows several similar services to be developed (helping to reduce unintended consequences) while still ensuring consistency and reuse because many of the rules are the same between them. She goes on to say
"A strategy for reuse of business services must include an approval process for changes which begins with the “owner” of the business service"
It seems to me that this too leads you inevitably to the use of business rules to help close the gap between IT and the business and deliver the gap between IT and the business that can be managed by the business.
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Posted by James Taylor at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2007
Why optimize decisions - a nice list
John over at Big Sky Thinking had a nice post today on the reasons for optimizing decisions. It's a good list and worth checking out. I had a few comments:
- Business model innovation, like outsourcing and "smartsourcing", really repay (and perhaps even require) and investment in decisioning. Check out the book "The only sustainable edge" for some nice examples.
- Compliance is a huge and growing issue and Compliance any more - as John says, decision compliance matters too.
- As the world moves faster, decision cycles will keep getting smaller as he notes.
- Decision automation, or enterprise decision management as I call it, is more and more practical and proven
It's a nice post and typical of the thought John brings to his blog. You can subscribe to it at http://feeds.feedburner.com/BigSkyThinking
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Posted by James Taylor at 1:59 PM | Comments (0)
Analytics - centralized or distributed
Bella posted an interesting comment today - here - on my post about the opportunity for analytics in which she commented on Tom Davenport's POV in Competing on Analytics. Her comment about the pros and cons of centralizing analytics made me think that it was worth a post. She feels that Tom's proposal to centralize analytics is a classic consultant mistake (at least that's how I read it). Interestingly the same kind of "centralize analytics" message came through in the recent TDWI report.
It seems to me that a centralized analytics group is a consequence of widespread use of analytics more than it is a driver of it. Certainly most large organizations that use analytics in many areas tend to have a centralized analytics group. However, like Bella, I agree that most organizations are going to be better off focusing on developing analytic expertise in specific areas of their business. Not, perhaps, in a specific business process but certainly in support of a specific group of business processes. The data understanding, business know-how and focus on improvement necessary will all be easier to develop with a strong focus. The time, I think, to focus on a centralized analytic group is as you expand into multiple areas and start to really focus on a standard deployment infrastructure and toolset. The "E" in Enterprise Decision Management is not meant to imply that you must do everything enterprise-wide so much as that you must consider decisions an enterprise asset and decision management an enterprise skill.
Thought anyone?
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Posted by James Taylor at 12:42 PM | Comments (0)
February 16, 2007
The opportunity for analytics
Final interesting article in DM Review this month - Dealing with Data: Data Analytics: A Huge Opportunity by Shari Rogalski. She does a nice job of summarizing the research and makes some good points. A couple of things I wanted to highlight:
- You must move to a predictive mindset, not an analyze-the-past mindset. Check out my predictive analytics FAQ if you are not sure what this means
- You must act first, not just know first, if your data is going to give you a competitive edge
- Retail may be a growth area but financial services and insurance, among others, have been doing this a while in risk-centric decisions
- You need to focus on the decisions you are trying to improve, not just on the data
- One of the great benefits of this approach is that front-line staff, and self-service systems, get the benefit of analytical insight without having to look at reports themselves - a change in mindset
I just reviewed Tom Davenport's great new book, Competing on Analytics, and if you like the article you should probably pre-order it here. I also mentioned another accenture study in a long post promoted by a TDWI survey on Predictive Analytics - that post has all the links you could need or want to explore the topic so I will leave it there.
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Posted by James Taylor at 1:20 PM | Comments (0)
Metadata and business rules
Second interesting article in this issue of DM Review was Capturing Intellectual Capital in Metadata By Sid Adelman and Bonnie O'Neil. I believe that Sid and Bonnie are working on a book on this topic - hopefully I will get an early copy to review :-). I mention the article because it seems to me, and I think to them, that one of the key types of metadata, and of intellectual capital, is business rules. Using business rules to codify knowledge not just to capture it but also to allow it to be automated and used to drive consistent decisions across the enterprise can be immensely valuable. You need to identify and capture decisions that are driven by those rules, not just the rules, but this is a comparatively minor additional step.
I blogged about knowledge management and rules once before and my colleague Ian blogged twice recently about the challenges faced in insurance by retiring baby boomers (here and here). The power of business rules capture as a way to stay out of trouble was also caught vividly in this story.
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Posted by James Taylor at 1:06 PM | Comments (0)
Nice article on Business Event Monitoring
The February issue of DM Review was full of good articles. First up, Solve Real-Life Business Problems with Business Event Monitoring by Sam Barclay. Sam's article did a nice job of bringing together both BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) and CEP (Complex Event Processing) and of articulating a value proposition for them. One quote in particular caught my eye:
"The real recipe for ... success is not to send every single activity to everyone"
I completely agree. Of course I would go further. I would ask if anyone needs to be sent the activity or can decisions be made without a person? Can I replace "peopleware" (who have to be awake, employed, logged in etc) with a system smart enough to make good decisions on its own? At least, can I do that most of the time?
I posted before about BI 2.0 and about how Enterprise Decision Management and the automation of decisions enhances BAM. I also answered some questions on Complex Event Processing from a reader that you might find useful.
The bottom line is that while business rules, and other EDM technologies like predictive analytics and optimization, can be usefully deployed in event monitoring they can also, and more effectively, be used to automate the decisions for which the event processing identifies a need.