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 [...]

I was pointed to a post today on the topic of customer service (Another Day, Another Customer-Service Nightmare on the EconoWhiner) that pointed out that companies
need to provide quality service and quality customer service if they’re going to survive an economic downturn as severe as this one?
Now I am not going to pick on AOL [...]

Last week I saw a post comparing Best Buy and Circuit City - one thriving and one going into bankruptcy - and it made me think about the role of decision management in Best Buy’s success. I have head Best Buy present various times an a number of elements of their successful customer-centricity strategy are [...]

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 [...]

Savvion today announced it has released a Business Rules Management System. Now this may suprise you - after all Savvion is a Business Process Management vendor - but I think it is a sign of the growing recognition that decision management is important to business process management. Before this announcement Savvion was using Yasu’s product [...]

An old friend sent me a link to an article on the Financial Times - How to survive an IT squeeze. I was struck by a couple of quotes:
Scarcity of capital will generate increased competition for the cash that is available. Consequently it will be even more important that businesses do everything they can to [...]

Great comment from monkchips on twitter today:
the key to customer relationship management is to treat your clients as people rather than accounts. everything else follows from that.
Of course the challenge is how to make sure that all the people who work for you and all the systems your clients use do this. While you can [...]

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 [...]

I just wrote an article for BPM Institute on The Technology of Business (Enterprise) Decision Management. It’s short but, if you want more, Neil and I are working on a multi-vendor study of the technology for decision management that we should have available really soon…

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 [...]