I can’t blog this session live as John Rymer and Mike Gualtieri have asked me to participate. What follows is a combination of thoughts based on the presentation and post-presentation notes.
The theme of the presentation is that “The next frontier in business process management (BPM) and business rules is automating decisions within business processes”. If [...]

I’m going to be on stage with Mike Gualtieri soon but I thought I would drop in and listen to him on the future of application development. Sadly this meant missing a session on BI but even I can’t be in two places at once. Mike’s theme is that the value of application developers in [...]

Dean Hager from Lawson came on to follow-up on the dynamic business applications story. Dynamic means “continuous change, activity, or progress” and Enterprise Applications “suck at this” to use his words. But this is a problem as the world is changing - people change, events cause change, the business climate changes and more. He asked [...]

Connie Moore and John Rymer kicked off today talking about Dynamic Business Applications and their first discussion was around brown paper bags. They made the point that brown paper bags are a pure commodity and all you can do is reduce costs. Other kinds of bags offer more opportunities for innovation and, thus, more margins. [...]

Mike Gualtieri of Forrester had a blog post a few months back that I missed then but that he pointed out to me this week - What Is Your Future? In it he outlines two scenarios at either end of a continuum. One is that application development changes in incremental ways such that “The application [...]

Back on this blog for John Rymer of Forrester talking about dynamic business applications (about which I have blogged before) and how the next generation of systems will be designed for people and built for change. John began by showing a video of a broker’s desktop demonstration built by Adobe and some partners. Brokers are [...]

Next up Discover and Fair Isaac talking about Discover’s Enterprise Decision Management initiative. Dave Wodall from Discover co-presented with Xun Shao of Fair Isaac. Discover use Blaze Advisor (rules), Model Builder (analytics) and Decision Optimizer (portfolio optimization). Discover was launched in 1985 and, like Amex, has both the network and the consumer relationship. 50M members, [...]

Next up was Chris Collard of Dell talking about building a decision engine. Chris had done an implementation at Dell Financial Services and was sharing some of his experience with replicating that at Dell. Chris talks about decision engines as full decomposed applications - data, process and logic all externalized. Chris’ central thesis is
Effective Decision [...]

Jeff Jonas wrote an interesting post - Custom Software Scope Changes (Not) - that reminded me of my ongoing battle to argue that rules are not requirements. Jeff argues that we take far too little time designing custom software before we start to build it. A summary quote from his post illustrates his point:
I am [...]

A couple of weeks ago I got an update from the folks at InRule. InRule was founded in 2002 in Chicago and has 100+ customers. Their focus, like most business rules vendors, is on dynamic decisioning and process agility. They estimate that nearly half their prospective customers are also doing BPM not just rules. InRule [...]