I often post about the weakness inherent in many approaches to business intelligence - this one on getting a competitive advantage, this one on dashboards and this one on moving beyond BI come to mind - so it is nice to be able to recommend an article on analytics and BI. Dave Wells wrote a nice summary on this tpoic Business Analytics – Getting the Point. I highly recommend reading this article and, in particular, there is a great graphic :

This graphic makes a number of things clear:

• You must take action for intelligence to be useful
• You must track and analyze outcomes to understand what worked
• Your results must influence the next actions you take so that you can learn

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Intelligence • Decision Technologies • Predictive Analytics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I thought it would be fun to highlight my 20 most popular posts from the last couple of years so here goes:

1. Keeping Predictive Analytics and BI on separate tracks
   
2. If IT wants to alter outcomes, it needs to automate decisions
   
3. Business rules, events and processes
   
4. Getting a competitive advantage from your data
   
5. Achieving Agility - some notes after Gartner
   
6. Introducing business decision management
   
7. Here's a way to put analytic solutions in the driving seat
   
8. Decision Technologies and Active Data Warehousing
   
9. SOA and Business Rules, perfect together
   
10. Business rules, routing rules, event rules
    
11. Decision Services
    
12. Decision management is critical to event driven architecture
    
13. Decision Management - another way to get the business to care about SOA
    
14. Marketing Analytics in a Post-Web 2.0 World
    
15. Little known ways to improve customer experience
    
16. More on rules and event processing
    
17. Business rules, desktops and knowledge buses
    
18. If dashboards are the end game, kill me now...
    
19. COBIT, SOX, compliance and business rules
    
20. Call for Presentations - the new EDM Summit
    

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Agility • Business Intelligence • Business Process Management • Business Process Outsourcing • Business Rules • Compliance • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Innovation • Legacy Modernization • Predictive Analytics • Requirements • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• How are you integrating business rules and analytics?
• How are you adding intelligence to your business processes?
• How are you putting analytics to work in your operational systems?
• How, in other words, are you using Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) to innovate your business? Your colleagues and peers want to know.

We invite you to present at the Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) Summit OCTOBER 26-30, 2008 -- ORLANDO, FL  

Join us this year to share how the technologies and approaches of Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) have helped your organization deliver agility while managing risk, focusing on customers, or demonstrating compliance. Whether you call this Business Decision Management or Customer Decision Management or just Decision Management, we want to hear from you. The EDM Summit brings together managers, practitioners and vendors to talk about what works and to provide attendees with a host of practical ideas they can put to use in their own companies. These practical ideas don’t come from us, they come from you.

Most of all, we want real-life case studies. We want to hear what really happened, what worked and what did not, from the actual people who undertook them. Whether you want to show how you got started or how you have learned from experience, whether you want to talk about technology, people or methodology we want real-life cases. If you are a consultant or vendor, the best way to be accepted is to co-present with someone from your client’s organization. Real experience, not company positioning or marketing buzzwords, is what it takes to be selected.

Particular areas of interest include, but are not limited to ...

• Using decision services with BPM or SOA to put intelligence into composite applications
• Using business rules and analytics or data mining in combination
• Implementing adaptive control and champion/challenger testing
• The impact of the technologies and approaches of EDM on the software development life cycle

 Your presentation ideas are welcome in any of our mainstay topic areas, including ...

• Business Rule Management Systems and Engines
• Data Mining and Predictive Analytics Technologies
• Techniques and Methodologies for Data Mining and Predictive Analytics
• Decision Services, Business Rules and SOA
• Adaptive Control and Optimization
• Managing Decisions in BPM and SOA
• Moving to BI 2.0 / Operational BI
  
• Event-based Decision Management
• Compliance and Risk Management
• Organizational Change

Not on the list? Tell us about your own unique ideas! Top architect at a mainstream software vendor? Creator of a highly innovative product? We will consider your presentation for our Chief Architect's track. Highly selective. 

We Want to Hear from You ...

We welcome presentation ideas from all! Do you have a business success story? Best practices about how to use decision management technology? Significant progress in applying data mining to operational systems? EDM Summit is THE place to present on experience, proven solutions and new innovations in this exciting area. We bring together companies and experts from diverse industries in a unique and exciting venue to share their experiences. Do you know qualified colleagues who would make great Forum speakers? Click here to forward this message to a friend. Invite them to submit their Presentation Abstract for consideration!

CALL FOR PRESENTATIONS SUBMISSION DEADLINE: March 31, 2008  

To submit your presentation idea ...
Step 1. Please read the Speaker Agreement carefully.

Step 2. Complete the Speaker Abstract Submission Form.
Presenters will receive a full complimentary registration to the Business Rules Forum, including the two co-located conferences Enterprise Decision Management (EDM) Summit and Rules Technology Summit as well as to RulesExpo.

Got a question? Please email us at speakerinfo@businessrulesforum.com 

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Agility • Business Intelligence • Business Process Management • Business Rules • Compliance • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Predictive Analytics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Gary Cokins had a post this week When Analytic Solutions take the Back Seat in which he bemoaned the fact that customer facing processes so often fail to be improved analytically. For all the work done in supporting technical, back-office processes, customer service is often left out in the analytic cold. I have blogged a lot recently about how decision management can drive a better customer experience but Gary's point is a good one - all too often customer facing processes are not improved in this way. Part of the reason is, as Gary notes, a lack of will power on the part of companies and a failure to realize just how much damage bad customer service can do. But pat of it comes from failing to see how and where a customer facing process can be improved.
One of the clearest things when discussing customer treatment decisions in customer-facing processes is that companies massively underestimate the number of treatment decisions they make. Every time they display a webpage, list a voice prompt, make a customer service rep refer someone to their manager, generate a script for someone in a call center, display member details to a store clerk they make a treatment decision. These decisions are often made the same way for every customer, failing completely to deliver the kind of customer service people want. Find these decisions, focus on them and you will find plenty of ways to usefully apply analytics to improve them.

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Mike Kavitz had an interesting post today - Transforming the business with BPM and SOA - and it made me wonder what collection of approaches you really need to transform a business. While experts, and I can be guilty of this too, like to push their own approach "just do what I say and you will be a success", the reality is that many things contribute to truly transforming a business. Mike correctly identifies a couple of them but I would add a few (using their most common names):

• Business Process Management (BPM)
  Allowing the business to participate and even own, for the first time, the definition of how their information systems support their business is clearly transformative.
• Enterprise Decision Management (EDM)
  Automating and improving the operational decisions within these systems and processes to ensure precision, agility and consistency changes the role of front line staff, turns better data into better actions and thus outcomes, and empowers executives to change the way their organization acts. I think that counts as transformative.
• Complex Event Processing (CEP)
  The ability to move to event-driven approaches instead of process-centric or batch-oriented responses is a key component for a real-time enterprise. Complementing and complemented by BPM and EDM, CEP gets the nod for enabling this change of mindset.
• Corporate Performance Management (CPM)
  You can't manage what you can't measure and performance management is how you measure the success or failure of different process designs, event responses or decision strategies.
• Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)
  Closely related to CPM, BAM is about pushing the results of this monitoring to the people who need to act. Combined with automating responses where possible and managing the processes that handle these responses, BAM can truly make a difference.
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
  Underpinning all of these, a focus on reusable, coherent, composable, well defined services instead of large, monolithic applications.

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Predictive Analytics • SOA | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Sandy Kemsley had a series of interesting posts from the recent Gartner BPM summit. Two caught my eye especially. This one about a Bill Gassman session and this one about a Janelle Hill one. Both of them made me think about straight through processing or "hands free" or "lights out" or whatever you call it. Bill's session talked about reducing the "latency between events and actions" and emphasized business activity monitoring (BAM) as a solution. Janelle meanwhile implied that a focus on effective processes not just efficient ones meant that the focus in business process management (BPM) was no longer on straight through processing (STP) but on collaboration and softer aspect of processes. Both sessions to me pointed out a basic problem with the definition of straight through processing. If you are using BAM to get actions taken in response to events or just using a BPM tool to automate processes, then you are not doing STP for real.

Real STP means no manual intervention for the vast majority of transactions - say 90-95%. It means automated responses to events that should trigger processes or actions. It means handling these transactions as well if not better than a person would, not simply automating it in a "dumb" way. This means people cannot be required to respond to time-critical events and that processes must have access to sophisticated decision-making so that they don't have to refer something to a person or make dangerously over-simplified assumptions about how customers or transactions should be handled. This kind of real STP requires a focus on decision automation and decision management, not just on event or process management.

Janelle identified six types of process, similar to the three types IDC talk about, and these seem to boil down to event centric, people centric (or unstructured) and transactional. There is a role for decision services in all of them. In event-centric ones, a decision service can ensure that the right process is started or right action is taken. In transactional ones, decision services can increase the rate of STP while also improving the quality of decision making and maintaining agility (as defined by Gartner and discussed by me here). In people-centric processes, decision services can guide and direct, refer and route according to complex rules and analytics. Indeed this kind of automated decisioning is at the heart of many kinds of solutions and neglecting it while consider BAM or BPM is a bad idea.

[Sorry for the pause in blogging, back now]

Technorati Tags: BAM, BPM, business activity monitoring, business process management, Column 2, decision service, Gartner, IDC, Sandy Kemsley, STP, straight through processing, event processing

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Mike Ferguson wrote an interesting piece today on A Business Process and Performance Management Framework for the Intelligent Business over on the B-Eye network. He talks about the need to have a more coherent performance management stack to bring balanced scorecard (largely strategic) work and Six Sigma (largely operational) work together. This requires management at both the strategic and operational level with integrated objectives and results monitoring. Now it is true that operational people need to manage their performance also but they are far less likely to have the analytic skills implied in a typical performance management approach and, even if they do, they are unlikely to know the current business strategy well enough to interpret it correctly and so make the right decisions. After all, at an operational level, what matters are the customer treatment and other "front-line" decisions people make. Automating these decisions allows you to ensure that your strategy passes down to the front line.

When I read about performance management I hear a lot about dashboards, reports, KPIs and so on. This to me is all about performance monitoring. I cannot help but feel this is missing an opportunity. What if the systems being so carefully instrumented to provide these great reports and dashboards, were also easy to change? What if the people who see the dashboard and understand the importance of the KPIs could respond to them by logging on to a system and changing the way the systems, and thus the company, behave? What if your alerts were to tell you how your systems had responded not to ask you to respond? Decision technologies can be  used to manage decisions in parallel with the technologies that let you monitor it allowing you to shift your CPM into action. Even Business Activity Monitoring assumes that a person must respond and that may well not be possible. Organizations must respond faster forcing them to become increasingly event-centric which means they need to be decision-centric also. This actually maps well to many people's vision of where business process management is going - Maureen Fleming of IDC, for instance, has a nice structure for this about which I blogged before.

Mike does end with a diagram that has rules at the center but I think he misses a trick by not talking about decisions and decision management as part of the operational environment.

For those of you confused by all the acronyms in this area, check out my acronym post and Mike wrote another excellent article some time ago called Building Intelligent Agents using Business Activity Monitoring for DM Review about which I blogged over on my other blog.

Technorati Tags: analytics, balanced scorecard, BAM, business activity monitoring, business rules, corporate performance management, CPM, customer decisions, decision management, monitoring, six sigma

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Process Management • Decision Technologies | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I promise this will be the last post on event processing for a while but Tim Bass posted a comment to me and this post on this blog - Bending CEP for Rules. Tim was making the point that CEP is not just business rules plus an event-driven architecture. While he is correct, I think he may have slightly missed the point I was trying to make. This could, of course, be my fault for failing to explain. So here goes:

While the use of business rules, and indeed predictive analytics, might well be an ideal platform for complex event processing or CEP, this is not the same as using those technologies to manage decisions. Decisions that a particular combination of events from the "event cloud" is significant is a CEP decision and might be best implemented in a technology that understands more about events and that can do event stream processing - a true CEP engine, perhaps. However, deciding what to do as a result, assuming that this decision is more complex than simply punting to a person and hoping for the best, is about business decision-making and managing these decisions is my focus. Business rules represent a great platform for managing decisions and more complex decisions, or more precision in decision-making, typically require both a business rules platform and the use of executable analytics to turn uncertainty into proability. It is also true that an event-processing decision might involve knowing, for instance, that a customer involved in the events is a valuable one. This component decision - is this customer a valuable one - is also a business decision and should be managed as such separately from the need to use the decision as part of deciding how to process an event. All of this means that while business decision automation is not the same as complex event processing, the two approaches are complimentary and rely on similar technological approaches.

I wrote a post on the alphabet soup in this area and this one on why SOA, EDA, BPM and CEP are all Complementary - and need decisions. Paul Vincent had this nice one on the differences between a BRE and a rule-driven CEP engine  and this post over on my other blog - Business Rules, Business Decisions, Intelligent Processes, Enterprise Decision Management - tried to pull a few of these threads together.

Technorati Tags: analytics, automated decision making, BAM, business rules, CEP, complex event processing, David Luckham, decision automation, decision management, EDA, EDM, enterprise decision management, event-driven architecture, predictive analytics

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Predictive Analytics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Timo Elliott over at the BI Questions blog had some great cartoons on this topic - this one about "gut-feel" and this one about what executives want from BI. These are both genuinely funny but they also point out a serious issue - that gut-feel may be overrated but that it will not necessarily be replaced with better decision-making just because more data is available.

It seems to me that there are two aspects to this problem - the problem of executives (who want the magic button for strategic decisions) and the problem of workers (who want a somewhat magical button for day-to-day stuff). Starting with the second one, you can (and should) focus on the challenge of automating decisions not just supporting them. After all, front-line workers have less time and less experience with data analysis and so are easier to overwhelm with data. They are also, perhaps, not the people you want making "gut-feel" decisions about your customers.

Clearly this does not work for the strategic decisions, however, as they are not repeatable enough to lend themselves to automation. Often these decisions are about decision strategy - how aggressive should I be about pricing decisions, about retention, about risk. If you think about each of the operational decisions (micro decisions) and automate them then one of the side effects is the ability to run simulations of how a change in strategy might impact these decisions. This is, of course, not something you could do if those decisions were being taken manually. This allows you to consider the macro as well as the micro decisions in a systematic way.

While this kind of decision simulation has not got to the point of being able to say "Let's say you want to save millions of dollars - you just push this button here", it is at the point where you can say "which of these three approaches should generate the best return, given the real-world constraints on my business" and then have an easy way to pick the rules that seem to work best and push them into production without pain.

I blogged about another Joe McKendrick post that seems relevant here - Sharing intelligence with your systems - and you might like this article on shifting your CPM into action. Meanwhile Cyril had a nice post on this too Decision Automation in BI: Design Guidelines for Business Analytics and Rules 

Technorati Tags: automated decision making, business agility, business rules, competing on analytics, decision automation, decision management, decision service, micro decisions, optimization, predictive analytics, simulation

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Intelligence • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Predictive Analytics | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Michael Dortch blogged a post over on the BI in Action blog today - BI, BPM, and SOA: Alphabet Soup that's GOOD for You! Inspired by his comments I thought I would see how many TLAs I could get in a title while still writing a coherent post. I managed 9 (yes, I know, BI is not a TLA technically but whatever):

• BPM or Business Process Management is about defining, managing and controlling the business processes that underpin your business
• BPO or Business Process Outsourcing is about contracting with someone else to run one of these business processes for you
• BI or Business Intelligence is about understanding your business by analyzing the data you have
• CPM or Corporate Performance Management (sometimes called Business Performance Management) is about monitoring the results your business is achieving through analyzing the data you collect
• SOA or Service-Oriented Architecture is an approach to building an application architecture from loosely-coupled component services
• EDA or Event-Driven Architecture uses events and the responses systems take to these events as the primary organizing principle of systems
• CEP or Complex Event Processing involves correlating many events, often related to different business processes, and then automating an appropriate response to these events
• BAM or Business Activity Monitoring alerts businesses to problems, issues, goals met or other indicators of how well a process is executing, typically in real-time

So now all I have to do, having ransacked Wikipedia for definitions, is tie all this together

• If you automate a business process with BPM, how do you get straight-through processing if people must make all the decisions?
• If you outsource a process with BPO, how do you keep control of the critical decisions in that process?
• If your BI systems tell you what worked in the past, how do you apply that to decisions you will take in the future?
• If your CPM environment tells you something is going wrong, what decisions can you take to respond?
• If you are using SOA to be more agile, what happens when a service makes decisions that must change often?
• In your EDA, are you just going to tell people to act or are your systems going to take a decision to act in response to an event?
• Once you have correlated your events in your CEP system, how do you decide what should be done?
• When your BAM dashboard tells a manager you have hit a goal, they can change their decisions but how do they change the decisions taken by their systems?

Decisions, decisions, decisions. And that brings us to the 9th TLA - EDM or Enterprise Decision Management. Enterprise decision management, or decision management, is an approach for managing and improving decisions. It involves separating out the operational decisions in your environment, automating them using business rules and predictive analytics, and then managing and adapting them over time to ensure they reflect changing conditions. As you would expect, these are topics I have written about a lot. You might start with this post on decision services as they are key to embedding automated decisions in your application architecture. Regardless of where you stand on SOA and EDA you should check out this post on SOA and EDA and why decisioning complements both and this one on reasons to automate decisions when adopting SOA. I also wrote this article on rules and SOA and this post on being event-driven and decision-centric. There's a fair bit on the blog about the intersection of BPM and BI and I wrote this article on how business rules can be a platform for bringing BI to bear on BPM. I have blogged about why rules are needed in CEP and on how decisioning complements BAM as well as this article on shifting your CPM into action. There some stuff on how rules and decisioning can make BPO work better and some of this is summarized in this post about driving overall agility. There's also a lot more on these topics and others on my other blog, www.edmblog.com, to which you can subscribe here.

Phew. I am worn out by all these acronyms.

Technorati Tags: adaptive control, automated decision making, BAM, BI, BPM, BPO, business process, business process outsourcing, business rules, CEP, decision automation, decision service, EDA, EDM, enterprise decision management, event-driven architecture, predictive analytics, SOA, service-oriented architecture

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Agility • Business Intelligence • Business Process Management • Business Process Outsourcing • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Predictive Analytics • SOA | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

<shameless commerce>

As some of you know by now I have been working, with Neil Raden, on a new book. As the files shipped to the printers today I thought I would take the opportunity to shamelessly plug the book here on the blog. The book's premise is that much of today's existing technology has the potential to be "smart enough" to make a big difference to your organization's business and that current business trends are forcing you to build smarter systems. Like this blog, the book discusses how focusing on decisions as distinct opportunities for improvement, you can use established technologies in a new way to solve problems and create competitive advantage.

You can pre-order it here from Prentice Hall (there is even a blog discount coupon code TAYLOR7962) or from amazon.com here (amazon.com has not yet decided what price it will charge).

The book has a companion site too - http://www.smartenoughsystems.com where you can subscribe to news about the book/authors and read the testimonials we got. Over time we will add more useful links to the site.

If you are not yet convinced that you need to read the book, why not try the digital shortcut "Why you Need Smart Enough Systems". You can buy it online from Prentice Hall  for less than $5! If you need to be convinced that you need to use decision management to make your systems smart enough to be useful (or if you have colleagues or customers who don't understand why they should apply the techniques we talk about on the blog), you will find this a good read.

</shameless commerce>

Technorati Tags: adaptive control, business rules, data mining, decision, decision automation, decision service, decision service, EDM, enterprise decision management, optimization, predictive analytics, Smart (Enough) Systems, smartenoughsystems

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Agility • Business Intelligence • Business Process Management • Business Process Outsourcing • Business Rules • Compliance • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Innovation • Legacy Modernization • Predictive Analytics • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Maureen Fleming of IDC gave an interesting presentation in San Mateo last week - A view of BPM in 2007 and beyond. It's a great presentation and two things in particular struck me and prompted a post - her use of decision services and her categorization of BPM tools. Based on her presentation I developed a slightly different diagram (shown below).

Maureen categorized BPM into Sense and Respond, People-Centric and Transaction-Centric (the gray boxes in the diagram) and talked about how these are conceptually linked with Sense and Respond triggering People-Centric for investigation and Transaction-Centric for automation while Transaction-Centric trigger People-Centric for exception handling (these links shown with curved arrows). Maureen went on to talk about using an ESB to hook all this up and the role of event processing, activity monitoring and process analytics in all this. I would add the important role that Decision Services play in this kind of setup. Providing answers to questions raised by other elements, they can be easily integrated into the ESB as shown in the diagram.

I have written before about SOA, BPM, CEP and business rules and why business rules matter in an event-driven SOA. Keeping decisions, and rules, separate like this helps avoid over-synchronizing rules and processes and is not the same as the use of rules technology in BPM (or BAM or CEP).

If you are interested you might enjoy this podcast from the bloggers here at ebizQ on BPM in 2007 and this post on intelligent process automation

BTW Bruce Silver's great article on this topic in Intelligent Enterprise is here: Analysis: Where Rules Management and BPM Meet

Technorati Tags: BAM, BPM, business process, business rules, CEP, decision service, forrester, SOA

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • SOA | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Steve Jones had this post on SOA v EDA while David Luckham posted on why SOA, EDA, BPM and CEP are all complementary. I think these two have it right - SOA and EDA are complimentary as are EDA and BPM. They represent different ways to bring services (components) together to solve business problems. I would go further and say that decision services are the right way to bring rules into SOA. I have blogged before about SOA, BPM, CEP and business rules and why business rules matter in an event-driven SOA. I think event driven design is particularly suitable for what I call transaction-centric decisioning too and that's a good thing.

I also recommend two articles in SOA magazine - this one on business rules in SOA and this one on SOA and EDA.

Technorati Tags: business rules, CEP, complex event process, decision technology, EDA, event-driven architecture, SOA, decision service

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Enabling the Event-Driven Enterprise by Mike Lough is an interesting take on the need to better exploit events, something often tied to decision-making. Mike makes some good points in this article and a couple in particular made me want to reply or add to what he said.

For example, financial services firms require real-time events to protect their customer's identities and assets from fraudulent behavior.

This is not just an event-based thing. While it is true that catching fraud means responding quickly to events, it also means using rules and analytics together (what many call Enterprise Decision Management)

They need to receive the events in real-time, not even 'near real-time' to gain a competitive advantage and efficiently run their business.

I have blogged before about Real-time v right-time but I also think that the issue is one of acting first not knowing first. Good event notification can help you know first, good decision automation can help you act first too.

Benefits include enhanced business processes, improved decision-making, efficient marketing, better user experiences, lower costs and increase revenues

This reminded me of why you should manage decisions (one of my first posts on this blog) and to remind everyone of the value of managing decisions as a corporate asset

Typical approaches to Business Intelligence are no longer sufficient, especially for Business Process Management and Business Activity Monitoring where the goal is to drive the real-time enterprise

I completely agree with this sentiment. Traditional BI simply does not cut it when you are trying to drive insight into processes. You need intelligent business processes or BI 2.0  and you need to think about shifting your performance management into action.

Bottom line is, that in order to optimize the Event-Driven Enterprise, businesses must integrate a CEP engine with an online data platform to deliver real-time events across the enterprise, driving businesses to new levels of efficiency while enhancing the user experience.

I think SOA and EDA are very complementary and I highly recommend some of the analysts' discussions around Intelligent Process Automation.

One last note, remember that using rules to manage decisions is not the same as taking rules-driven approaches to CEP/BAM

Technorati Tags: analytics, business rules, CEP, complex event process, decision technology, EDA, enterprise decision management, event-driven architecture, SOA, EDM

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I saw this interesting article today (on ebizQ) by John Senor - Business Intelligence Goes Deep. John starts off making some good points. He says that you need "enhanced business intelligence at the deepest level - embedded within essential business processes" and that "business interaction is about events that occur and how businesses respond to such events" given that those events "can trigger different responses that involve intelligent decision making". Absolutely. He goes on to say that for "process-driven BI, decision making is a fundamental aspect of any operational business process". And he's right about that too. I'm agreeing with so much of the article at this point that I could have written it myself! But then he loses me...

Discussing what events can cause processes to do, he discusses Alerts, Analytics, Data Visualization and Reporting. I'm a little worried now - after all decisions should result in ACTIONS not these other things. And then I notice that everyone of the four items talks about "users" -"allowing users to resolve issues" or "to inform users" or "enabling users". Now I have to disagree with him. If all your business intelligence/business process integration is doing is helping users then you are not going to deliver on straight-through processing or on automated decision-making and 24x7 responsiveness. For that, you need to embed intelligence into decision-making and that requires predictive analytics.

Now this theme has come up a couple of times recently (here and here). I believe that effective process automation requires effective decision automation and that the identification and automation of decision services delivers the integration points you need. Built for change and with business rules, these decision services are ideal for enhancement with executable intelligence in the form of predictive analytic - the business rules management system provides the platform for executing analytics.This allows you to use your data not just collect it and integrates with both Business Process Management (BPM) and Business Activity Monitoring (BAM).

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Intelligence • Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Event Processing • Predictive Analytics | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Ismael posted this week on Where BPM and BI intersect. It's a nice post with some good points on which I wanted to expand. Firstly Ismael mentions BI as a way to understand your Business Activity Monitoring environment better. I have posted elsewhere about decisioning and BAM but I do think that analytics, as against reporting and analysis, can add real value to BAM if applied correctly. As Ismael says

"If you know what you’re looking for, this should give you some useful hint as to how you could improve your business processes at the first place"

Some of these improvements will be the kind that must be made manually to the process design. Some are more about realizing that certain data should drive you down certain parts of your process, and that's really about decisioning.

"data will look to you as nothing more than the audit trail of processes that have been executed"
"the data they collect tends to be easier to consume for decision making purposes"

Again, I agree, but companies must think about using their data not just collecting it. When they do I believe they will find that decision technologies can be a platform for analytics in BPM. Finally I want to add some commentary to this comment:

"using a complete BPMS for handling the downstream process that follows BI-driven decisions would make a lot of sense"

This is, of course, true. But how will you develop "BI-driven decisions" in the first place? Well you could build decision services that embedded rules and analytics (this is one of the 7 ways to use decision technologies). This might result in something that looks very like a transaction-centric process.

Technorati Tags: analytics, BAM, BI, BPMS, BRMS, business agility, business process management, business rules, decision service, intelligent process, busienss activity monitoring

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Agility • Business Intelligence • Business Process Management • Business Rules • Decision Technologies | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am attending webMethods Integration World this week (ebizQ is a media sponsor) and blogging live from the sessions. Next up for me was Susan Ganeshan of webMethods talking about the Business Process Management capabilities of Fabric 7.

Processes have evolved over time with lots of patchwork systems with data and process steps moving around between systems creating a "Patchwork Process". Lots of different kinds of processes with wide variation between them in terms of what kind of data is involved, people to people v system to system etc. However, almost always has both people and systems interacting in processes. Susan quoted Tom Dwyer of Yankee group as emphasizing that the benefits of Business Process Management, Business Rules Management, Business Activity Monitoring and SOA can be multiplied if they are combined effectively. She also talked about Gartner's Business Process Maturity Model and how it moves from very straightforward to highly adaptive BPM.

Susan discussed some key themes and features for Fabric 7 and here is my dump of the ones that caught my eye:

• Make it easy to identify and fix problems using integration and BAM facilities
• Allows management and design of processes by combining portal, process and modeling tools into a single BPM environment that supports BPMN and BPEL and allows the definition of KPIs for measurement once the process is running.
• Fabric 7 supports documenting the process, swim-lane by swim-lane, so that less technical users can see how their piece would work.
• The BPM environment is designed to support both system to system and people to system interactions
• Reuse was important to customers so offer integration with source code control system for asset management
• Metadata is captured as process is designed and this is stored in the new metadata repository with query and searches to help you find reusable components and then allow drag and drop of these assets into new processes.
• Codeless development of pages for managing data to replace very labor-intensive design tasks when trying to capture or edit data being passed around the process. The forms have some ability to manage data validation and retrieve data etc. Hopefully there is also the option to use more complex validation (based on Blaze Advisor) but I will have to check, although it sounds like you can.
• Workflow includes routing rules based on roles and both dynamic and static rules. In addition these routing rules can leverage more complex rules running in the rules engine (e.g. "route to person X if this rule service says they are a gold customer and to person Y if they are not). The worklist management comes out of the box and supports Outlook, which sounds cool.
• The business rules engine (Blaze Advisor) runs in the integration server alongside the process engine. Susan identified two main uses - complex processes involving complex decisioning rules and need to change the rules quickly. While this involves externalized rules they are still nicely integrated into the process design pallette. I think there are some more options for embedding decision services into an SOA but these are key reasons. Taken with the BPMS features this should deliver real business agility.
• Fabric has some good flow and transformation capabilities already and reuses this in Fabric 7. The integration of the rule server into the integration server should mean this can also use rules in Blaze Advisor to handle very complex transformations.
• Testing got an upgrade too. You can now insert test data into the process model and watch it flow through or set breakpoints and debug it in a more technical way all in the design environment.
• Built on the BAM environment to do some roll-up monitoring and drill-down into the process to see which steps are causing problems and so on. Some nice integration of monitoring with events to help see what might have caused changes in monitored levels.
• Metadata repository is used to do impact analysis as make changes and the Cerebra repository automatically managed the linkages between services so you can do impact analysis without having to do a bunch of manual updates as to what each service does. I am sure, though I don't know, that this is also going to work with the Blaze Advisor repository to bring rules into this environment.

Fabric 7 is trying to bring all the features you need around BPM/BAM/BRMS on an well-governed SOA-based and integration-rich platform. Looks cool.

I am speaking tomorrow at 2:45pm on "Automating High-Volume Business Decisions within an SOA"

Technorati Tags: BPM, BPMS, BRE, BRMS, business agility, business process management, business rule, business rules, dashboard, integration, service, SOA, webMethods

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Agility • Business Process Management • Business Rules • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am attending webMethods Integration World this week and blogging live from the sessions. Next up was Kristin Muhlner (EVP Product Development at webMethods). Kristin is the last session before the break (when hopefully I will find a network connection and get these posted).

Kristin was giving a pitch for webMethods Fabric 7.0, their upcoming release. Their themes are:

• Guide Process Improvement
  Apparently a major focus for webMethods customers, who started from an integration focus, especially around helping the business understand the value. Lots of work here on their BAM product so you can understand behavior of current state and then see where you might improve it.
• Empower the business
  The new release focuses on improving collaboration between IT and business and they have done a chunk of work around the UI for developing process definitions as well as building better interfaces for end users. Hopefully this is one area where their embedding of Blaze Advisor for rules will also help. The use of Blaze Advisor in Fabric 7 as well as a number of other features are focused on empowering the business through increasing business agility.
• Revolutionize systems development
  Essentially IT departments must now do composite application development across very distributed systems. Changes for this involved things like governance and metadata, distributed debugging etc as well as an ongoing commitment to standards. Kristin also talked about the use of these infrastructure components to foster a culture of reuse.

Obviously I am biased, they are an OEM of my company's rules engine, but Fabric 7 looks like the kind of BPM/SOA/Rules infrastructure people are going to need in a world of composite applications. Business Process Integration indeed.

I am speaking tomorrow at 2:45pm on "Automating High-Volume Business Decisions within an SOA"

Technorati Tags: BPM, BPMS, business process management, integration, service, SOA, webMethods

Posted by jtaylor in Business Activity Monitoring • Business Agility • Business Process Management • Business Rules • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am attending the Brainstorm BPM/SOA/Rules event in Washington DC this week and blogging as I go.

First session of day 2 was Achieving Operational Excellence with BPM with Jannelle Hill of Gartner. She discussed BPM as a management theory of business process management to use process as an organizing concept in business, not function. Complements functional orientation for operational excellence, increasingly with agility as well as more traditional benefits. She asserted, and I agree, that to some extent everything you have ever done to automate stuff is "process management" but implicit, not explicit. Not visible to business people and they cannot manipulate the transactions flowing through the process. BPM is about making all this explicit. Key issues she identified:

• how can you find the inefficiencies
• how can you achieve sustained operational excellent
• what evidence exists to show BPM works

She went through the steps involved, the roles of business and IT, presented some example results and described what a process-driven management company might look like.

Technorati Tags: agility, BAM, BPM, BPMS, BRE, BRMS, Business Process Management, Business Rules, CEP, Event Processing, services, SOA

So, what are the steps to adopting this that she identified?

1. Use process as an organizational concept to breach silos (organizational and technical/application)
   Business rules and process steps owned by people in the business while hand-offs made explicit and roles aligned and can identify obvious inefficiencies - automation opportunities for example. It seemed to me that this is si