Steve Cranford of PwC wrote an interesting piece called Bringing Order to Chaos (brought to my attention by Alan over at Tibco) that made me think. Steve’s focus is on the next software suite for enterprises (something he calls an Intelligent Business Performance Platform) consisting of business intelligence, business process and business rules. Reading this [...]

I got a chance to speak with ILOG today and do some thinking so it’s time to write more about the IBM and ILOG announcement. As it is an acquisition of one publicly traded company by another neither company can legally say very much. As a result I, like everyone else, have a bunch of [...]

Some time ago I saw an article that discussed the 8Ps (4 old, 4 new) of Marketing. It seemed to me that decision making, especially operational/transactional decision making is critical to most of these Ps. Here, then, is my summary of the 8Ps and why decisions, and decision management, matter.
4 Ps

Product
You might think that [...]

Visual Numerics is a 100 person, privately held company that’s been around for a while - nearly 40 years - and yet is largely under the radar thanks to the size of other “analytics” companies. As the business world moves from BI to analytics it is sometimes finding that BI tools are really focused on [...]

David Greer had a cutely named post this week - The Engine That Can. David and I had a nice chat about eOptimize a few days ago and I thought I would respond to his post with some thoughts of my own. eOptimize’s product is unlike those often described as decision management applications - it [...]

Ken Vollmer kicked off the last day of the event with a view from the field - a survey on BPM that Forrester did at the end of 2007. The theme is that “BPM has already achieved mainstream status inside of most enterprises but we still have a long way to go to achieve the [...]

I spoke to Seth Grimes last week about an article he was writing that just published on Intelligent Enterprise -What BI Practitioners Can Learn From Operations Research. As I was reading the article I also noticed a response over on Michael Trick’s OR blog -Business Intelligence and Operations Research. Both Seth’s article and Michael’s response [...]

Ted Iacobuzio of TowerGroup gave the closing keynote, expanding on the survey results Fair Isaac announced today. More than 100 of the InterACT attendees took the survey - clearly this is top of mind. Some highlights:

Lenders appreciate the need for integrated customer information and multi-product decisioning
Lenders are not all at the same speed in implementation
Respondents [...]

Last full session today is Lisa Kart and Jean Zoch of Fair Isaac talking about optimal pricing - balancing profitability with competitiveness. Lisa’s focus, she says, is on what makes price optimization work. Price optimization is a very broad topic, even in financial services, but their focus is on being able to target price for [...]

Paul Daro was next giving some detail around the new architecture (introduced by Bernhard Nann). A number of trends were identified first:

Clearly the move to a collection of services from monolithic applications has fundamentally changed the relationship of vendors to customers - now more about delivering services that can be fitted in to an overall [...]