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Interesting news on discussion of predictive analytics at the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS) - PREDICTIVE MODELING RAISES OPPORTUNITIES AND ISSUES FOR ACTUARIES AND INSURERS, CAS ANNUAL MEETING IS TOLD.  Typical quote:"The use of predictive modeling techniques is becoming increasingly popular among a wide variety of insurance companies because of its potential to give insurers – especially personal lines insurers – an edge in competitive markets."A number of key issues were identified at this meeting: Don't blindly implement - make sure you understand the impact Explicability - make sure you can explain how the models work to a regulator Right tools - use appropriate tools An Enterprise Decision Management approach works perfectly for this. Business rules and scorecards make it easy to explain decisions. Unlike other kinds of predictive models, Fair Isaac scorecards are specifically designed to show how and why a particular score resulted. Business rules are also easy to understand and make it easy to track which rules fired for a given...

Interesting note in this EDS blog on the commoditization of process. What is interesting to me is that all this discussion is around the flow, management and performance being standardized or commoditized. If you use these processes, and so do your competitors, how can you still differentiate yourself? Well you could make sure the business rules that drive the decision points in the process are unique and a match for your corporate perspective/attitude/philosophy. Using a business rules management system you can inject automated decisioning into the processes, whether you run them, someone else runs them or you use a standard one. Not only will this give you efficiency gains, by eliminating manual decision-making steps, it will let you easily change the decision policies within your process maximizing agility, allowing for personalization and ensuring that your customers still feel they are dealing with you, not with some generic enterprise. I wrote on this topic a couple of times previously here, in the context of Business Process outsourcing -...

Attending an OMG event today I participated in some sessions on Compliance. OMG is getting more active in compliance, both with the OMG Regulatory Compliance Alliance and with a Domain SIG. Lots of interesting discussions about how to turn regulations into something parse-able or executable as well as some wonderful stats on regulations and compliance: Regulatory compliance costs IT $billions annually The US alone passes over 4,000 new final rules annually Basel II will cost over $15B globally A typical international bank may be governed by over 1000 regulations The full presentation will be made available here. There were also some good discussions around the mismatch between business folks and IT in  regard to compliance - the IT folks know they are going to have to spend money on this while business folks seemed to think that no additional IT spend would be required. Finally there were some good discussions on how to show an ROI for compliance initiatives, somewhere I think Decision Yield has a role to play. The specific article on decision...

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One of the questions I get a lot is "how do I build a list of requirements" when selecting a business rules engine or business rules management system. These, it seems to me, fall into various categories: Rule Syntax - what basic mechanisms exist for editing rules? Business User Editing Environment - how easy is it for business users to edit rules? Decision Process Design - how can you design a multi-step decision? Performance Tuning and Debugging - what reports and tools exist? Reporting - how extensive are the reports available? Rule storage and versioning - how good is the repository infrastructure? Integration - how easily does the system integrate with the rest of your IT infrastructure? Dialog Support - how does the system integrate with user interactions? Help and Documentation - what is available? Let's consider each of those in turn: Rule Syntax Is the out of the box rule language understandable by business experts? Does the language handle procedural or technical functions without calling out? Can the...

Interesting entry on SOX compliance in the "compliance pipeline" today - Prediction No. 2: Manpower Reductions.  In it Mitch says:That can only mean one thing: Companies are substituting sustainable automated processes for manual approaches to compliance management. And the good news is that such automation will also reduce the manual processes that auditors will need to perform and help drive down auditing costs as well.The automation of compliance has always been one of the key drivers for the use of business rules management systems and with good reason. Business rules allow those who understand the regulations to manage the implementation of those regulations. Business rules make it quick and easy to change how a regulation is implemented when court rulings, auditors of the government change the rules. Business rules can be easily logged as they fire, making it possible to show that every decision was compliant with those rules. Executives who must certify that the rules have been followed can actually read the rules being enforced in the...

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This article - IT Could Help Ailing Health Care Systems - led with the statement that "Health care systems across the developed world are struggling to coordinate care and keep patients informed about what their medications do. That's the conclusion of a report released this month by the Commonwealth Fund."The United States scored markedly worse than other countries in terms of patients' access to health care, financial burdens placed on patients, errors and efficiency, but patients in all countries reported high rates of mistakes, poor care coordination, and otherwise deficient care.So why have healthcare providers not implemented systems to fix or at least improve some of these problems. Well, of course, many have tried. One of the reasons for failure is, I think, the problems caused by the usual mismatch of IT and the "business". Many projects, in all kinds of industries, suffer from this - the business understands the problem but not the technology used to try and solve it and the IT folks don't really understand the business problem. In...