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)

I saw this post on Offshore Architects, Legacy maintenance and modernization and it struck me, again, how valuable business rules and a focus on the automation of decisions can be in legacy modernization. By separating out the high-change, highly volatile rules into self-contained decisions you can:

• Reduce the number of changes required to the hard-to-modify legacy code by externalizing the high change pieces as easy-to-change business rules.
• Make the core business logic reusable in your SOA through decision services.
• Ensure that the business know-how relevant to your core logic stays onshore, even if most of the maintenance work is offshore.
• Give those architects who think maintenance is boring something more interesting to do - adopting a rules management system and making the changes to the SDLC to take full advantage of it should be fun enough for the most jaded.
• Make re-platforming and the adopting of business process automation or outsourcing much easier by brining the tough business logic under real control

• Modernizing COBOL with business rules
• Live from Delphi - When Your Business Knowledge Goes East
• Using decision technologies to manage application maintenance
• Business rules and the application knowledge deficit
• Lean application development and maintenance - some thoughts
• Using business rules to renovate old applications
• Here's a way to use business rules to manage offshore development

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Outsourcing • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Legacy Modernization | Permalink | Comments (1) | 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)

Ian pointed me to this today: Intelligent Enterprise Magazine: Seven Trends for 2007. Doug, David and Penny from Intelligent Enterprise, with some help, came up with a nice list and it prompted me to cross-reference it with EDM:

• Capture Expertise Before Boomers Retire.
• Using business rules to capture this knowledge in a way that allows it to be automated is one of the primary drivers for business rules projects according to KPI's survey on this topic.
• Knowledge Management and Business Rules Management are not the same but they are related and can be complimentary
• Empowering business people to manage the rules in their systems also makes knowledge transfer and capture an ongoing process.
• Remember, as Thomas Huxley said, "The great end of life is not knowledge, but action"
• Designing for Agility: Business Analysts Step Up.
• The role of business rules in delivering agility is well documented, and mentioned in the article. Indeed there is a whole section on this blog on business agility.
• Similarly I believe there is a great future for business rules in great future and keeping control of outsourced processes.
• The role of analysts, and especially of "purple people" who cross-over between IT and the business is definitely a key consideration in agility
• I think business rules and business process management together deliver agility best as there are various kinds of agility.
• The problems inherent in how business and IT think differently have come up before and is one of my readiness criteria for decision management.
• Integration as Cure: the Future of Medical Records.
• While I think electronic medical records will help, I think the real issue is better medical decision-making and that means more than just records - you must eliminate errors too.
• Predictive analytics are a must and the power of automation to improve health should not be underestimated.
• Manufacturing's Job One: Improve Information Flow.
• Again I don't disagree but I think more automation that uses this information is what is called for.
• Parallel or Bust: Computing at a Crossroads
• I don't do hardware...
• Let's See Action: BI Adapts to Real Time.
• I have written about BI 2.0 and real-time BI before and think that, while it is useful, we need new approaches (like EDM) to bring analytic insight into our business processes and make intelligent processes
• The issue with real-time is the decision latency, not just the data latency - how fast can I ACT based on the new data, not how fast can I get it
• Build Up From SOA to Business Integration.
• I think EDM and SOA are highly complementary. Enough said.

Enjoy 2007, more predictions to come.

Technorati Tags: analytics, BI, BPMS, BRMS, business agility, business process management, business rules, decision latency, EDM, Enterprise Decision Management, knowledge management, predictive analytics, SOA

Posted by jtaylor in Business Agility • Business Intelligence • Business Process Management • Business Process Outsourcing • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • Predictive Analytics • SOA | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I was reading a piece called "Creating an SOA-Enabled BPO Platform" by William Martorelli of Forrester this weekend and much as I liked the piece, he seemed to me to be missing a key component for an SOA-platform for Business Process Outsourcing - decision automation. He says

Faced with these challenges — and forced to achieve one-to-many customer leverage in order to make money — BPO (business process outsourcing) providers are adopting layered service delivery architecture capable of isolating them from complexity.

I completely agree that a decent software infrastructure, and one based on SOA, is going to be critical for BPOs in the future. However, while William's discussion of business rules, and the need for a business rules engine external to the applications executing the process steps that can be rapidly updated, is spot on I think he misses a couple of key points:

• The rules must be exposed in a way that allows the customer of the BPO provider to manage the rules.
  The critical capability is that the customer can continue to control the rules, even while the BPO runs the process
• The rules must be layered
  While some of the rules will be provided by the BPO as part of its expertise and thus standard across multiple customers, those being edited by a customer must be different for each customer. To build a scalable platform this means one service taking a decision but taking a decision in a customer-specific way. Some rules engines support this approach, others do not. If you have to build a rules-based decision service for each customer, it is not going to work.
• Many decisions involve both business rules and analytics - knowledge/expertise embodied in the rules and data analysis embodied in the analytics.
  Only focusing on the value of analytics in terms of process analytics is not enough. The BPO will need to allow customers to build models from data and inject these analytics into the decisions also. Smart BPOs may realize that anonymized aggregated data gives them the power to build analytic models also and use these to differentiate the service they offer, especially to customers that do not have enough data of their own.

William also talks about an SOA-based approach enabling multi-vendor BPO solutions. Here I agree with him and think we will see a growth in what Fair Isaac has started to call "Decision Service Providers" who provide automated decisions for use in other processes. Clearly a company suitable for efficient management of a process may not be the one suitable for making a complex decision involving risk-tradeoffs and complex analytics or one that is heavily regulated. Using a Decision Service Provider for this would allow the injection of critical expertise (in marketing, underwriting, retention) into an outsourced process, or indeed one being executed by the company itself.

I have blogged about the value of business rules in a BPO architecture before on my other blog and written about the value of business rules in implementing a digital business architecture such as Forrester describes as well as on how business rules can enable business/IT collaboration or "concurrent business engineering.

Technorati Tags: analytics, BPO, BRE, BRMS, business agility, business rules, Forrester, outsourcing

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Outsourcing • Business Rules • Decision Technologies • SOA | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am attending the Delphi Business and Process Innovation Summit this week and blogging as I go. Next up is Thomas Koulopoulos on Smartsourcing: A Method-based Framework for Making Sourcing Decision Thomas was introducing his Smartsourcing framework. He made some nice introductory comments:

• 10% savings from wage arbitrage and this is one time saving
• Rest comes from process improvement and execution excellence
• Very hard to outsource processes we don't understand but this is often the main objective
• Most organizations cannot allocate costs like IT to processes
• Ownership no longer denotes control - no need to own the whole chain any more
• Mostly about risk transference so accurate risk assessment is key
• One of the side-effects of outsourcing is documentation of the process!

Thomas then outlined a classic graph showing how rate of change and core v non-core gives candidates for outsourcing but reality can be more complex as I am still on the hook to my shareholders and regulators so perhaps have to keep some control. For instance, if a really good customer calls and the call center is outsourced, how do I make sure the cross-sell happens? I could route to the onshore person who is better or I could automate the decision.

Thomas's Smartsourcing methodology has a core level (a dashboard and some analysis - subjective and quick) and an optional level (starts getting into gap analysis, innovation assessment and benchmarking). Key concept is a two by two matrix with axes of "How good is your performance" and "How core is this is"

• Functional Processes are Core and Excellent execution- optimize and continuously improve
• Re-engineering candidates are Core but Poor execution - need to do better
• Outsourcing candidates are Non-Core and Poor execution (because you won't know a good version)
• Offshoring is good when Excellent execution but Non-Core as you could describe it to someone else to do more cheaply

This all changes all the time - time is a fifth dimension to this view.

Tom's assessment comes in a subjective approach (Level 1), more objective (Level 2) or scenario based Level 3). At each level the staff plot each process in the excellence v core chart as a bubble where size of bubble reflects uncertainty - a small bubble shows agreement in terms of mapping where a large one shows uncertainty of ideal outcome. Each bubble might be within just one of the four quadrants or might straddle several. Assumptions can then be analyzed to see who the processes move around the graph. Very effective discussion tool as it makes people think about processes and how they might be managed.

This seems like it would complement the work around decision yield, though I have to think about it some to explain how. Thomas wrote a book on this that I have not read yet but seems like it would be good - you can buy it and check it out here.

BTW I am speaking tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: BPM, business process management, outsourcing, BPO

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Management • Business Process Outsourcing • Innovation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am attending the Delphi Business and Process Innovation Summit this week and blogging as I go.

Christian de Neef was next up on When Your Business Knowledge Goes East... Key Risks and Benefits of Offshoring Business Critical Applications. Christian gave an overview of various markets for outsourcing and showed how large top-tier companies are moving more and more jobs offshore. One interesting note is that he and several audience members felt that approximately 1.5 jobs are created for each job outsourced thanks to the process style, asynchronous communication etc. That said, many of the companies in India, for example, have strong process maturity around Six Sigma, ISO 9000, CMM etc. Very disciplined on process but this can produce well managed rubbish if you don't watch it. He outlined how outsourcing started with infrastructure then application development now increasingly vertical. Knowledge Processes beginning to be outsourced also. I am not sure I buy this - I think companies are automating these kind of processes rather than outsourcing them (see this section on Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) on my other blog for instance).

His case study was on Axa and their attempt to reinvent themselves by using very fined grained segmentation, targeting with new product packaging and loyalty management (typical insurance strategy - see this section over on the other blog about insurance). They wanted to use a product factory (software to build insurance products), tariff engine (rating engine) and rules engine. But getting the rules right by analyzing code was hard and was outsourced. In this situation the outsourcer said yes too much (underestimated complexity, not enough Axa resources, quality of rules poor). The lesson learned was not to leave the rules in the hands of the outsourcer - well duh! That would be why you should put it in a rules engine! Then your business people can control them and the outsourcer can run the process.

This was more of a case study in how NOT to manage legacy modernization and all these problems are typical when folks try to get legacy rules into a rules engine without thinking about it enough.

Christian was an excellent presenter and I am not saying that just because he gave out Belgium Chocolates! I am speaking tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: agility, BRE, BRMS, Business Rules, decision technology, legacy modernization, BPO

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Outsourcing • Business Rules • Legacy Modernization | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am attending the Delphi Business and Process Innovation Summit this week and blogging as I go.

First session was Thomas Koulopoulos on The Road to Agra: A View of Globalization from the Front Lines and the Back Streets. Thomas focused on innovation and globalization. He asked the audience what their core-competence is and tried to show, quite successfully, that only a focus on that and an innovation process can lead to success.

In a wide-ranging speech he covered how people's world view tends not to include the electronic networks that connect the planet and he used his experience of a trip in India, especially the road from Delhi to Agra (home of the Taj Mahal) as an analogy. He asked the question "What kind of economy will the US, or Europe, have if the developing world succeeds in its growth?" What is "special" about the US? He discussed how inter-reliance is both key and essential and how one should never underestimate the impact of compounding many small achievements.

His concern is that keeping the lights on in a complex organization is preventing from a focus on innovation

• Invention is science - comes from scientific method
• Creativity is art, the moment of creation
• Innovation is the process of intersection

He predicated that affordability is the most important driver for many recent innovations, as self-service was in the last century. In a world like ours, where more transistors were produced, more cheaply than rice last year the pressure between cost management and innovation is narrowing the acceptable range. You have less room for error. More than ever we need leadership and innovation.

Thomas' blog is at The Innovation Zone

I am speaking tomorrow if you are attending.

Posted by jtaylor in Business Process Outsourcing • Innovation | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)