JT on EDM

Some time ago I linked to an interesting looking research project and the results are now available - Development and Verification of Rule Based Systems - a Survey of Developers. Valentin did a nice job summarizing the results, comparing them to a previous study of more academic projects and drawing some distinctions between academic and [...]

Jim Sinur brought up an interesting point today when he blogged IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP have bought Business Rule Technology. What’s up with that? The big players seem to be toying with business rules - there’s plenty of activity but not much understanding or commitment.

SAP bought Yasu but until recently did not show much [...]

Recently, Ronan Bradley discussed the challenges for banks in the area of compliance, given the rapidly changing environment. He made three specific points with which I agree and that I think shows the value of a decision management approach for banks and others facing an unknown but difficult regulatory environment in the next year or [...]

Last week I got a chance to catch up with a Dutch company in the decision management space - Be Informed. Be Informed arose out of work within a big systems integrator building complex processes, especially in government, that was unable to find good tools for case management and complex knowledge-based processes. The company [...]

CRM Daily had a nice little article on Customer Retention that reminded me of the example I often use for how the elements of decision management contribute to more effective customer retention decisions. Large organizations spend vast sums on retention - one bank, for instance, spends $1Bn annually - and retention is a perfect candidate [...]

I was chatting with someone the other day who shared a story of a European health insurer.  Their decision-making in claims looked only at the validity of the claim and nothing else. This of course created a situation where good (and very profitable customers) could be treated correctly but ineffectively - such as one member [...]

David Kim, MD of the Americas for Innovations Software Technology briefed me recently on the Bosch acquisition of the company. Innovations Software Technology was founded in 1997 and had grown to about 120 employees by September when it was acquired by the Bosch group.
Bosch is a $63B company (61% automotive, 13 %industrial, 26% consumer [...]

I thought I would wrap up with some closing thoughts for the week:

Lots of discussion of the importance of data - understanding it, integrating it, cleaning it and making the same data available to those reporting on it, doing analytics with it and running operational systems.
Interesting times in the rules market with recent acquisitions by [...]

Not really live this post as I am working from notes I took - after all I was on the panel and it’s hard to participate and blog at the same time. Joining me on the panel were Don Baisley of Microsoft, Ron Ross and Jim Sinur (of Gartner) - Neil had to leave. We [...]

Stuart Crawford from Fair Isaac’s R&D group presented on New Approaches to Creating, Simplifying and Visualizing Rules. While decision trees can be very clear, they can also become very complex. His group has been working on algorithms for simplifying decision trees. Because decision trees often have repeating sub-trees - pieces of the tree that are [...]